


But It's Not Sane

by grungerofgotham



Series: the only way it could have happened [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Coherent Timeline? i dont know her, Fluff, Gerry is really sad guys, I promise, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced beating up a shitty old man, Multi, Not Canon Compliant, Suicidal Thoughts, but dont worry he gets better, everybody kind of lives, it/its pronouns, what if Michael ate all of Gerry's problems
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-18
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:42:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23197282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grungerofgotham/pseuds/grungerofgotham
Summary: When Michael doesn't come back from Sannikov Land, Gerry has to find a way to deal with it.The impossible doors are some what of a... distraction.
Relationships: Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner (minor), Gerard Keay/Michael, Gerard Keay/Michael Shelley, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Series: the only way it could have happened [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1661791
Comments: 63
Kudos: 275





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Continuation of Pour Some Tea For Two

When Michael doesn’t come back, Gerry knows what’s happened, and… he can’t cope. He isn’t coping, how is he even alive? Gerry doesn’t know, how can he? How can he know anything when life has so completely and utterly _fucked_ him, _again?_ He had been feeling good, damn it; he had been feeling _just fine_ for the first time in years and now that’s over.

The worst part is that Gerry can’t even bring himself to give a fuck about all that. He feels so much, all the time, and it’s so, so, painful, until it isn’t. There comes a time where the weight of it, the sheer fucking pull of it, drags everything right out of you, until you’re tied to the floor with nothing left but a whole lot of empty.

Michael doesn’t come back. A day after he was due to arrive home, Gerry wasn’t worried. What reason did he have to be? Beside knowing the nature of one Gertrude Robinson, how she would throw anyone away to save the world.

It might be a noble calling, Gerry supposes, trashing your emotions until you are a soulless husk, carrying out task, after mission, after deadline, until all your enemies are destroyed, and the world is safe. But Gerry doesn’t give a _fuck_ about the world. Gerry gives a fuck about- gave a fuck about Michael Shelley, and now he’s dead, or gone, or _something_. All Gerry knows is that he isn’t here, where he’s supposed to be, with Gerry.

He’s not here and it’s all Gerry’s _fault_. How could he have let this happen? How could he have been so stupid to let Gertrude lull him into a sense of false security? All she had to do was take him on a couple trips and bring him home safely and Gerry got complacent. Gerry let his guard down, and now he will never see Michael again, and Michael is dead, Michael is _gone_ , and he didn’t deserve it, he didn’t deserve, he didn’t, Michael, _fuck_.

A week after Michael was due to arrive back, Gerry gets mad. Gerry doesn’t know what to do with all this rage. There’s so much of it, and no Leitners in his immediate vicinity to take it out on. He can’t decide where to put all this anger, so he lets alcohol decide for him. Two weeks after, and Gerry’s already woken up with bloody knuckles more times than he can remember. It’s a fifty-fifty gamble on whether the blood is his or not, and either way, Gerry is never going to recall how it got there, but he can take a pretty good guess.

Three weeks, and Gerry is knocking down the door to Gertrude’s office, because he needs to fix this, he needs to and if he doesn’t, well, Gerry really can’t know what will happen. Gertrude does not feel compelled to tell Gerry anything about what happened, and Gerry is just about to decide that beating up an old woman isn’t entirely off the table when he is dragged away by security.

They call the police on him. Gerry almost laughs at this, because for the first time in a while he feels something that isn’t sad and black and angry and crippling. He feels betrayal. Through all his warnings about Gertrude and insistence that she is not to be trusted, Gerry had somehow still felt that she wouldn’t do this. He had really tricked himself into thinking she might spare Michael because… because, why? Because he was nice to her? Because Gertrude and Gerry had some sort of mutual pact? Whatever it was, it was surely imagined, because Gertrude sacrificed Michael anyway, and he’s gone now.

Melissa at the front desk avoids his eyes as the two coppers that came to take him to the station lead him to their car. It isn’t long before the angry looking one, Daisy he thinks he’d heard her named, decides he hasn’t done anything bad enough to bring him in properly. (‘Waste of our time,’ she had said. ‘You’re just mad he didn’t run, that you didn’t get your chase,’ ‘Shut up.’)

When Maggot disappears one day, Gerry actually thinks that he might die, right here and now. Gerry is so consumed with such incredible sadness that he really truly believes that he may spontaneously, just, stop living, any day now, any hour. Of course, Maggot would disappear, it’s the fucking cherry on top. One big misery sundae, and God has just forced it down his throat. Gerry _hopes_ he will choke on it. 

As if Maggot disappearing wasn’t enough, around the same time, Gerry starts seeing doors. Obviously, doors are common place objects, and they can be very good things; they keep people out or in, and they lead to places you want to go. But there are some places where doors just shouldn’t be, such as:

• Hovering in mid-air, in the middle of the subway station.  
• Horizontally embedded in the soil of an empty field beside an abandoned deli.  
• In place of his shower screen.

Gerry doesn’t really know what this means. He has an inkling it may have something to do with an entity or other, but he is just so tired. Evil being or not, it’s only a little inconvenient, so he really can’t bring himself to mind. In fact, on occasion, he gets so irritated that he can’t get to his toothpaste because there is a stupid fucking yellow door in the way, that he momentarily forgets that he’s sad, and for that, he’s grateful. But mostly, he’s just really not in the mood.

From time to time, Gerry also catches sight of something just, _shifting_ in the corner of his eye. It’s so vague that he can’t tell if the motion is fast or slow or jerky or smooth, but… he can tell that its… spiralling. He sees it in the water and in the sky, and in the streetlights when he’s stumbling on the road at night. Or that just might be the alcohol. Once, he’s lying face down on their, no- his, bed, and he sees that the individual fibres on the sheets have changed. Where before they went across and down and intersecting, now they swirl and undulate, making Gerry’s head ache something awful, well before he’s sobered enough to be hungover.

He has considered the possibility that he’s just going insane. He wouldn’t be surprised. Gerry never would have thought himself a romantic but now that he’s going crazy with the grief of losing the love of his life, he thinks, _huh, that is kind of romantic, I guess. In a very tragic and emo kind of way._

Gerry hopes that he either loses what’s left of his marbles quickly, or the entity that’s stalking him finally makes a move and ends his what-might-be-mistaken-for-a-life. Whatever happens, Gerry wants it to come soon, because if it doesn’t, he’s gonna have to find his own means to an end.

*

One night, about a month after Michael was due back from Sannikova, (Gerry has done some thorough checking since, and as he’d suspected, Sannikova has _never_ existed.) Gerry is on the street at about 2 am on a Tuesday, or a Thursday. Gerry’s not sure; he had checked his phone and he couldn’t exactly read the day, but it had started with a T, he’s sure of it, or maybe an H?

Anyway, he’s on the street. It’s dark but there’s streetlamps, and their lights are glimmering off the wet pavement and the reflections are spiralling, just out of sight, once again. Gerry is drunk as hell, but he knows what he’s seeing and he _cannot_ be bothered to think any more about it.

Just ahead of him on the road, there’s a man. He’s on the sidewalk and he’s glancing around furtively. Gerry thinks that he looks like a little rat, scurrying around like that. Gerry also thinks he looks really familiar.

Gerry crosses the street so that he’s on the same side as the man. He can see him more clearly, now, and he’s old and portly with completely grey hair. He _is_ familiar, because Gerry had spent months, if not years of his life, trying his damnedest to track this shitty old bitch down, sure that he couldn’t be dead.

Jurgen Fucking Leitner.

Of course, being the only other person on this stretch of road, Leitner doesn’t fail to notice the angry goth stalking toward him and tries in vain to find cover.

Gerry is on him before he can even begin to run, meeting him with a fist square in the face, and Gerry will at least remember where _this_ blood came from, for sure.

*

Satisfied with a job well done, Leitner moaning on the street, barely conscious and clutching at his multiple broken ribs, Gerry sits on the curb and watches placidly as police lights come racing down the street.

He’s in the back of a cop car before he knows it, with the same two officers that had picked him up from the institute.

“What are you, my case workers?” He grouches.

“Shut it,” Daisy snaps.

Gerry watches the other woman smile at this, looking at Daisy in a way that is not dissimilar to how Michael had once looked at Gerry when he said something comically glib or pessimistic. It’s sort of fond and exasperated. Gerry looks away.

They’re about halfway to the station when the radio crackles. Gerry can only make out this end of the conversation.

“You have the old man in custody?”

“What do you mean he disappeared, you had him in your car when we left.”

“People don’t just disappear.”

“No, I’m not letting him go, just because you lost the victim, doesn’t mean there was no cri- protocol my ass, we’re sectioned, I have the righ-.”

At this, the other officer puts a hand on Daisy’s shoulder, “Pull over.”

They make short work of finding a quiet area to pull the car onto the curb and dump Gerry onto the ground, still cuffed. In his inebriated state, he just lets himself fall onto his back as the two women stand above him.

“Where’d the old man go?” Daisy growls.

“What old man?”

This earns him a sharp kick to the ribs, “Don’t play dumb with me, Black Parade.”

“Daisy,” the other says, reprimanding.

“ _Basira_.” She shoots back.

“Where’d that blood come from then?” Basira asks calmly.

“It’s mine.”

“How’d you hurt your hands then?”

“I was punching a wall.”

“Why?”

“I’m sad and angry?”

They pause. Basira turns to Daisy, “I mean, he looks the part.”

They share a tense look before Daisy sighs, “ _Fine_. We’ll let him go.”

Without warning they are out of Gerry’s line of sight. Gerry rolls over to see them get into the police vehicle, and the conspicuous yellow door where the rear door should have been. “Fuck you,” Gerry says weakly, to the door, before rolling back to face the sky. He falls asleep like that.

*

Gerry spends three days in bed, hardly moving save to go to the toilet and make himself two lots of packet mac ‘n’ cheese over the 75-hour period. At some point he allows himself to put on one of Michael’s favourite sweaters. He lies down in it, the sleeves much too long, and cries for an indeterminate amount of time.

Over that half-a-week, Gerry sees that yellow door more and more. It’s the mirrored bathroom cabinet, it’s the fridge, it’s in the hallway, it’s in place of a window, it’s in an exterior wall, it’s in the ceiling above his bed. It’s there almost constantly, and Gerry gets to know it very well. The door itself is solid wood, painted a bright sunflower yellow. The door handle is shiny brass, and the door frame is the fluffy yellow of a duckling. It’s always the proper dimensions that a door should be, he knows it is, but it also always, always fits the shape of wherever it wants to occupy. Michael’s, no- Gerry’s fridge is not that tall, but the normal size door fits in perfectly, and if Gerry thinks about it for too long, he’ll get a headache.

For all the door may be menacing at times, it doesn’t feel that way at this moment. It’s there near constantly, for over 3 days. Gerry can’t help but feel that the thing behind it, whatever it may be, and at this point he’s quite sure it has to be the Spiral, is watching him, and more than that: it’s _worried,_ about him. Either that, or Gerry’s further along the train tracks to crazy town than he thought.

Gerry wakes up on the 3rd day, after he had slept fitfully in Michael’s sweater, to find he is no longer wearing it, and it’s not even in the room anymore. In fact, it’s not even in the apartment. It’s nowhere, and Gerry really hopes it had at least existed at one point.

*

After 3 days holed up in the flat, Gerry needs to get out, needs to get away from all the things that remind him of what he’s lost, and what he keeps losing.

He hangs around central London, being a general public nuisance, until he gets tired of almost seeing Michael everywhere. He’s heard of that phenomenon- The one where you see your dead loved one’s face everywhere after they’ve passed. He really hopes this is just that. He wouldn’t want to repeat the alternative.

_Rest in pieces, Mary,_ he thinks, pointedly looking toward the ground and not at the sky.

He goes instead to the nearest coast, and makes himself comfortable along the shore, sitting on the sand and staring into the sea. It smells like salt and rotting things, and he’s getting sand in places where it will be for weeks to come but he can’t bring himself to care as he looks out across the water. He allows himself to wonder, just for the moment, if Michael would like this. It’s cloudy; he knows Michael loves cloudy weather (‘Perfect tea weather,’ ‘Every type of weather is perfect tea weather, to you,’ ‘ _Ideal_ tea weather, then.’), and he knows Michael likes the water.

He figures it would make sense for Michael to like these two things together, even if it makes for a bleak picture. There are so many things he _didn’t_ know, though. He didn’t know if Michael preferred fish or chips, he didn’t know if he liked horror movies or romantic comedies (though he can take a guess). There’s so much he doesn’t know, and now it’s far too late to learn. 

Gerry wonders what it might be like, to walk into the sea. He knows all the heavy leather he wears would weigh him down. He knows his lungs would fill with water and seaweed and he knows his eyes would sting with the salt. But he doesn’t know what it would _feel_ like, to feel the sand suck at the soles of his boots, drawing him deeper. What it would feel like for his clothes to pull at his limbs as they soak in the brine. What it would feel like for the bacteria and microscopic organisms to swim into his skull and down his throat once he passes out. For a moment, he’s almost tempted.

Then he figures it will feel just as bad to get smashed and wake up with another hangover tomorrow; at least it won’t be a cold death.

*

On his way to his usual haunt, he spies that door again, smack in the centre of an alley, where nothing but dumpsters could be behind it.

There’s something different about it this time, though. This time, he can hear something behind it, and however much of a bad idea he knows it is to approach, he can’t help himself. 

He comes to a stop about a meter from the door, and he can make out the sound of a cat, meowing plaintively. But not just any cat. It sounds identical to Maggot. 

A year ago, Gerry would have laughed, if someone had told him that they’d recognised the sound of their cat, been able to distinguish it from any other. But having been responsible for feeding Maggot on many an occasion, Gerry is plenty familiar with the sound of a hungry Maggot, and the sound coming from behind that obnoxious yellow door, is _it._

There’s something else, though. Another sound, fainter than Maggot, burbling like a stream just underneath. Gerry’s breath catches in his throat as he recognises it as the gently placating tones of Michael, getting Maggot’s food ready. He can’t hear the words, but the tone, the cadence; it matches, without a sliver of a doubt.

Gerry is suddenly filled with a burning rage that he thought had deserted him weeks ago. How _dare_ this thing pretend to be Michael. It’s been watching him, and watching him, and watching him, doesn’t he know how much he hurts already? Isn’t that enough?

Doubt nags at Gerry’s mind, though. What if this isn’t a trick? What if Michael’s really behind that door and needs his help? What if he’s been trapped there for over a month now, and Gerry had just sat there, ignoring it, and not helping? He can’t take that chance.

Gerry takes a knife from his belt, and cautiously approaches the door. _This could be a really stupid idea_ , he reminds himself. He continues. He flips the knife into his left hand and slowly reaches toward the door handle with the other. Before he closes his hand around it, he takes a moment to steel himself for whatever he might face on the other side. In one swift movement he takes hold of the door handle and opens it…

Except that the door is no longer there, never had been and never will be, and he stumbles to the ground, lands on the knife, and feels it slice into his thigh just above the knee.

“Fuck!” 

_Oh well,_ he thinks, _I was gonna rip these jeans up anyway._

*

It’s an amount of time later. Days, weeks, hours, or minutes; they’re all starting to feel the same. Gerry comes to in a storm drain. It’s raining, somewhere between a drizzle and a pour. He can feel the water sloshing about him as it gurgles into the drain that he’s currently lying in.

Gerry gets slowly to his feet, mindful of his head, before he realises, he doesn’t have a headache, and wonders why the fuck was he in a storm drain, then? He shrugs to himself and moves to get out of the rain. 

He walks for a minute, alone on the deserted street. Everyone must be inside, sheltering from the rain. He spots the neon sign of a diner a little down the road, and makes his way over to it, as he’s getting quite cold. He enters the diner and the bell above the door jingles pleasantly. No one is inside. There are no customers, and there is no wait staff.

Gerry approaches the counter, and peers as far as he can into the kitchen, seeing no one, before ringing the bell. There’s no response.

_You’ve really done it now, Gerry. Must’ve slept in the wrong storm drain._

He leaves the diner and heads to the nearest subway entrance. The streets are still empty.

There’s no one in the subway, either. There’s no train, and there’s no signs. The underground is just a featureless, grey concrete box with no train in it. He heads back out onto the street and finds that the rain has stopped. In its place there’s a looming, heavy mist. 

It swirls in beckoning eddies, but not in the deeply confusing spirals that Gerry’s become acquainted with. No, this is the crooning promise of an eternal, painless, solitude. Gerry, finally recognising all the signs of the Lonely, begins to feel something else he can’t remember feeling since Michael didn’t come home.

He feels afraid.

He can’t even explain _why._ He’s already alone, everyone he holds dear has already been stripped from him, so why is he scared of being what he’s already become?

He doesn’t still have _hope,_ does he? Does he?

These are thoughts for another time, as Gerry sprints in the direction he thinks his apartment is. It’s hard to pinpoint just where he is with the thickening fog rising around his waist, but he can’t stop. After everything, he’ll be damned if the way he goes is taken by a _Lukas._

Even with his steadfast resolve, Gerry is starting to feel his grip slip. He’s beginning to know, deep in his bones, that he’ll never see another person again. He keeps running anyway, until he does. But it’s not who he wants to see.

“You! You bitch!” Gerry shouts at Peter Lukas, “You took Michael to Sannikova. You had a hand in this, you fuckin ass!” 

Gerry lunges at the old man, but he’s suddenly several feet further away, rendering his attempts useless. He glares at Lukas, until he shrugs, almost smiling, “I’m not responsible for any of this. You brought this upon yourself, Gerard. Nothing good ever comes from loving others. The only way to be pure, to be free of any blame, to be truly _you_ , is to be alone.”

The man turns around and walks calmly away, fading into the fog. Gerry runs after him, for minutes, or hours, he can’t be sure, but he’s gone. Eventually Gerry’s legs give out, and his knees hit the ground with no sound at all. He thinks he feels the cut on his knee open, and blood start to ooze out. But he doesn’t care.

Surrounded by mist, abandoned even by the worst humanity has to offer, Gerry… he gives up. There’s no point. Michael’s gone. Maggot’s gone. Mary was never truly _there_ , and Gertrude would sooner feed him to an eldritch monstrosity than be his friend. Gerry is so lonely, so, completely _forsaken_.

He sits on the damp ground, knees pulled up to his chest and sobs, as hard as he can, because he knows once the sadness has left him, all that will remain will be the loneliness, and he won’t be able to find his way back.

Just as the last drops fall from his chin, and Gerry begins to resolve himself to his new existence, he feels something warm, and soft, brush against his side, then wind around his legs. Startled, he scrambles backward. In front of him is… Maggot?

“ _Maggot?_ ” he says aloud.

“Mmmreow.” He says, rubbing his face against Gerry’s aching knee.

Gerry spins around, trying to find where Maggot could have come from, and is hardly surprised to find the yellow door, standing there, impossible as it always had been.

Gerry scoops Maggot off the ground and retrieves the knife from his belt. The door creaks open slightly, as if finally, after all this time, willing him to enter. He toes open the door the rest of the way, and steps through.

Inside is a corridor. Regular enough, despite its hideous colour scheme and the way it seems to stretch on forever. And in the corridor, is something else; something very hard to look at.

A sound bounces out from the depths of the corridor, shuddering and spiralling until it feels full inside Gerry’s head. The sound is Michael Shelley, saying “I’ll see you soon,” the last time Gerry had seen him. Would ever see him, or so he thought.

“’Soon’ was perhaps the wrong word, wasn’t it, Gerry.”

Gerry… Well, Gerry goes blank.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Michael navigates a new existence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> had a lot of fun with this one lads, hope you will too :)

Michael had never felt something so excruciating as becoming Michael. The way it exists as Michael now, it means, not the way Michael Shelley had existed. That had been a somewhat painful existence too, it remembers, or, perhaps remembers is the wrong word, because it does _remember,_ but that’s Michael remembering, and Michael is gone, but it is Michael now, so yes, it supposes; it does remember.

Michael Shelley’s existence was pointless and agonizing. As all human existences are. He had gone from day to day, doing the same thing over and over. He had cared and he had trusted, and he had loved. He had been thrown aside and he had been betrayed and he had been sacrificed. And in that sacrifice, he had done the most stupid, impossible, important thing he ever would do, though he hadn’t known it. He had opened the door, and now it is Michael.

Michael doesn’t like being Michael. The fact that the Great Twisting was interrupted by such a pointless being is a source of endless frustration. It’s rather muddied by the residual pride Michael Shelley had felt at completing a task that Gertrude Robinson had set him. It’s rather confusing, really. Michael laughs to itself; confusion _is_ it’s nature.

But still, the fact of being Michael tears at it. It has all these new old memories. It can’t feel. It can’t feel because it is a thing, not a person. But it used to be a person, or that part of him that could have been a person once, and those memories are all still there. So, it can’t love, or hate, or any of that stuff, it thinks. But it knows how to. It knows because it remembers how it felt to, before.

In some ways, the painfully twisting overlap between Michael and, well, Michael, are delightfully spiralling and impossible, and it feels like nourishment to some parts of it. To others, it just causes a great deal of pain. It hopes it will get used to it.

*

Sometimes, and also never, Michael likes to find an almost secluded corner of the world and twist some trees and stones around to its liking, sometimes it yells a winding scream into the air, just to vent its frustration, and to maybe draw a little bit of attention to itself. It watches as a few unlucky souls investigate the newly twisted area, before promptly getting lost and finding themselves in a long corridor. Michael laughs at this, the confusion and terror on their faces. It feels scared, almost, the part of it that once had the ability to feel things like fear, at the ease at which it takes people. It also doesn’t feel anything, because it’s very hungry. Even incomplete as it had been, the Great Twisting had taken a lot of energy.

Michael likes the corridors. They are it, and it is them, so it should be rather an obvious statement, but it likes how it can feel the corridors work to reconcile itself with its parts. It exists outside of everything else that might, and it feels like a safe zone, somewhere it can become Michael, without any of the messy painful parts. So, it spends a lot of time in there. Until it gets bored.

The most annoying thing, perhaps, about being Michael, is that it has all these aching almost-feelings now, and the longer they go unattended, the more they start to feel like actual-feelings, and that would be _very_ inconvenient for it. Most of the feelings are regular human-typical things like, oh-woe-is-me-I-was-fed-to-an-eldritch-monster, which is kind of hurtful, because Michael is the eldritch monster now, so it feels awfully like that very human experience of ‘self-loathing,’ and it does not enjoy that at all.

It also feels a lot of I-really-hope-Gerry’s-alright and don’t-be-silly-of-course-he-is-he-doesn’t-need-me. These are especially uncomfortable; Michael had a lot of self-worth issues. And even now that it knows Michael was actually pointless, along with the rest of the human race, it doesn’t stop the feeling, and Michael finds itself wishing it could’ve granted him a little bit of that human delusion of ‘self-esteem,’ if only to make these nasty feelings go away.

But by far the most cloying of these almost-feelings, is the I-really-want-to-see-him-again one. _That_ one is a real pain in the ass. And one that it feels it must deny itself from trying to eradicate. If Michael were to go see Gerard Keay, it knows all these stupid ugly emotions would make it all confused, and not in the good way. So, it sits on the emotion, trying not to act on it, hoping it’ll go away.

It fails.

*

The aching to see Gerard Keay again does lessen when Michael watches the man. But going to see him had given rise to another set of stupid feelings like I-want-to-talk-to-him, I-want-him-to-look-at-me, and I-want-to-touch him. Michael knows going to see Gerry was going to end badly. It knows that and it did it anyway because emotions are _dumb_ and it guesses it has them now, and that’s really, really, fucking inconvenient. There’s also the pesky little I-want-to-take-him. This is a ‘feeling’ that should be natural to it; it takes people all the time! But Michael doesn’t want to take Gerry’s sanity; he needs that. No, what Michael is feeling is the very human (eww) desire to take Gerry home, to hold him, maybe touch his face, and kiss him, if he would allow it. It has all the memories of what being with Gerry was like, but it hasn’t _experienced_ it, and it _hates_ that it wants to.

It could, it supposes, take Gerry’s sanity. It would be quite easy, given the intoxicated, depressed, and/or angry disposition of the man lately, but it knows deep in its twisting bones that that would have a very, very, bad effect on the emotions it’s feeling. It might even add oh-no-what-have-I-done into the mix. Michael shudders to think what dealing with that might entail. 

Michael tries to think why it’s feeling these things. Surely all these silly little human desires are fleeting. Surely, they aren’t permanent. Perhaps some temporary side effects of becoming Michael. Obviously, they won’t last, or god forbid, _grow_. Michael really doesn’t know what it might do if it starts to feel such things as l-… as lov-, ugh, it can’t even think the word. 

Michael thinks it should just wait it out for a little bit. It will not engage with Gerard Keay in any personal capacity, because that would be bad. Nor will it eat Gerry either, because that would be bad, too. So it waits, and instead of eating Gerry, it occupies itself with simply… existing in the same vicinity as him.

*

Michael is getting _very_ bored of waiting. It thinks maybe it’s worth it, for those few seconds when Gerry first sees its door, conspicuous and impossible. For those first precious seconds, Gerry looks delightfully confused. Then he looks annoyed, then bored, then indifferent. The shift between these emotions, so clear on his handsome face ( _Stop it, Michael, human concepts of physical attraction mean nothing to you now_ ), takes less and less time, the more Michael decides to be there, and the longer the bored and indifferent expressions linger. Michael does not like these looks on Gerry’s face. It does not like that they are directed at it, because it wants Gerry to like it, dammit! 

Desperate times call for desperate measures, Michael thinks, before taking its cat into the corridors. Cats don’t really care much for their surroundings, as long as there is plenty of food and places to sleep, a cat could not care less whether their environment is possible. So taking Maggot into its corridors did not mean Michael ate Maggot, which it is pleased about, because its only doing this to get Gerry’s attention, and it wouldn’t want to upset Gerry by eating his cat, even though Maggot is technically Michael’s cat. Michael is not Michael, but Michael’s cat is its because, well, because it wants it to be.

Gerry, however, does not seem pleased that his cat is gone. Gerry starts drinking more heavily, and more often, and that was not part of the plan _at all._ Michael is very upset at this turn of events and has to go eat a couple of people to calm down.

*

Michael goes back to just watching Gerry. Not interfering is getting a lot harder though. For all that it had taken a great deal of thought to come to the conclusion that it would not harm Gerard Keay, watching him harm himself through copious amounts of alcohol is rather alarming. _Yes, not eating Gerry was the right call,_ it thinks. It watches Gerry drink, it watches Gerry stumble toward thei- his flat, and it watches him pass out in an abandoned lot on the way there. It would be so easy to drag him through a door to his bedroom, Gerry wouldn’t think twice about how he got there, he would assume he just forgot he'd walked the rest of the way, but Michael _can’t_. It needs to keep its distance and be content with watching Gerry and eating only not-Gerrys.

“Just call me the Ceaseless Watcher,” Michael chuckles to itself. Maggot hisses at it.

Michael sees Gerry when he beats up that old man. It’s rather funny actually and Michael gets a good laugh out of it. Leitner is all like, “No, stop! What are you doing? Ow! It’s not my fault.” Michael is rather glad it can feel amusement.

Michael stops laughing when the police show up, though. It thinks it’d be rather annoying to only see Gerry in prison. Not to mention hard to find different places to put its door in only one small cell. If Michael doesn’t do something, and fast, Gerry might go to jail! He’ll probably be upset about that, and Michael hates to see Gerry upset.

It takes the old man. A brilliant move, Michael thinks. They loaded Leitner into the back of a police car, ready to take him to the hospital to deal with all that eternal bleeding. When they pulled into the emergency off-loading area, the car door was not a car door- it was Michael’s, and Jurgen stepped right out of the car, and into the corridors.

It entertained itself with watching the injured man wander around its corridors for an amount of time. Once, it lets Maggot into the stretch of hallway Jurgen is currently in. Jurgen looks so terribly confused to see a cat dart across his path. Michael finds it endlessly hilarious and delights further when its hysterical laughter bounces off the walls and makes Jurgen’s head spin. In the end, Michael feels he must be let go. It offers a door to the man, and he takes it, and finds himself in the winding maze that is the tunnels under the Magnus Institute. Michael chuckles to itself once more, and returns to Gerry, only to see him passing out on the ground where the officers had left him.

*

Michael finds itself getting more and more bored with simply watching. As much fun as watching an angry goth stomp and stumble around London is, it can’t help but feel like it’s missing something. Gerry is sad, and only in a detached way is Michael able to know that the reason Gerry is so forlorn is because it is now Michael. Michael does want Gerry to feel better though, so when he spends over 3 days in the flat, doing practically nothing, Michael is interested to start feeling something new that it calls oh-no-what’s-happening-I-need-to-help. Michael remembers that Michael used to feel this one a lot.

Michael wants Gerry to know that it’s there for him, so it takes Michael’s sweater. He had always looked rather good in this sweater, it’s glad to have it back. Michael must have done it the wrong way again, though, because when Gerry wakes up to an apartment that is one sweater less than when he went down, he looks really sad again. That wasn’t supposed to happen!

If Michael doesn’t start doing things right, it’s going to get really grumpy and it’s going to have to eat a few more people.

*

Finally, something seems to change. Michael can feel the shift as another entity starts encroaching on its territory. _Peter Lukas_. Michael is not happy about this. It sees Peter Lukas take Gerry and put him in the forsaken. It _takes_ Gerry _without_ its permission and puts him in his _stupid misty swamp!_ Michael is mad. Michael _eats_ Peter Lukas.

Well, it tries to. It really, really, wanted to eat Peter Lukas because he crossed a line; he nearly made Gerry into one of his. But it just can’t. He tastes _so_ bad. Almost as soon as Lukas is in the corridors, Michael feels itself retching, its corridors itching to throw this vile man out, so it does. Its door is in the air above the middle of the Atlantic Ocean when Michael spits him out.

Just because Peter is now drowning doesn’t mean Gerry isn’t still in the forsaken, though. Michael hurries back and sees him on the ground. Its chest feels… tight, at the sight of him like that. It feels like something new that it doesn’t have the energy to name right now. It lets Maggot out of the corridors. He mewls happily at being reunited with Gerry and Michael is almost-envious. Gerry startles to his feet at the feel of a cat at his side, and Michael can see his face is blotchy and red and streaked with tears. _Stupid Lukas,_ Michael thinks, _hurting my Gerry_.

Gerry turns around and sees its door. Michael feels so good when Gerry looks relieved at the sight of it. Finally, he wants what Michael is offering. Michael opens its door, and Gerry steps through.

The feelings that happen to Michael when Gerry sets foot on the carpet of its corridors are big and loud, and they kind of hurt, but in a good way? Michael feels full up with all the relief and completeness and wrongness and love and pain of finally having Gerry here in his corridors.

Gerry doesn’t look at it, at first. He seems preoccupied with all the memories of their time together that are flooding out of the corridors. He hears one. Michael Shelley, promising that they’ll see each other soon. It has been a while, though.

“Soon was perhaps the wrong word, wasn’t it, Gerry?”

Gerry finally turns to look at it. In all the frenzied emotion of Gerry being _here_ , Michael forgets to contain itself, and watches as Gerry collapses onto the floor.

“Oh, shit!” Michael says, wringing its hands, “My emotions killed him!”

*

Gerry startles awake and finds himself in the corridors. He sees the thing that is not Michael. It’s talking to Maggot, who is winding his way around its legs, as if it isn’t an eldritch horror.

It’s tall. It has blonde hair, falling in loose ringlets onto its shoulders. Its hands are long, and swollen, as if they house far too many bones. When it moves its appearance wobbles and undulates as if seen through rippling water. And it’s Michael. Gerry knows this. But it’s so very _not_ Michael, as well.

“I didn’t mean to knock him out, Maggot, I didn’t want to! I was trying to save him!” It’s flapping its long, weird hands about in a way that does _not_ remind Gerry of Michael, not one bit. “Oh, I hope he’s okay.”

It turns when it sees Gerry sit up, and a smile splits its face, stretching quite literally from ear to ear. In a moment it’s beside him, reaching toward him.

Gerry scrambles to his feet and backs up against the door. Except the door isn’t there, and instead he’s just walking backwards down a long corridor that he suspects doesn’t have an end. “You are not Michael.” 

“You’re correct!” The thing speaks, and it’s Michael’s voice, but different. It’s lilting and still has that lovely tone to it that Gerry had fallen in love with, but it’s… distorted now, fed through a filter so that what Gerry hears is fuzzy and hard to concentrate on. He concentrates anyway, because he could never ignore when Michael was talking to him. “But you know that’s not true.”

“What?”

“I _am_ Michael; that is the only name that comes close to describing what I am. And I am some of your Michael, or at least, he became some of me, but I am not him. I cannot be a him because I am not even a who.” It is not moving, but Gerry gets no further away from it, no matter how fast he stumbles backwards.

“What are you talking about? You can’t be him, because you said you are, and you lie. That’s what you are: you are lies!” Gerry is trying to keep his breathing under control.

“That is true, I suppose, I am the throat of delusion. But- I find I can’t lie to you, Gerry. It’s really rather annoying if I’m being honest. I feel loyalty only to the Spiral, but I also feel some kind of a- allegiance to you, I guess,” it puts its long winding fingertips against his lips, “God, I can barely say it, I feel sick.” It hiccups and swirling soap bubbles float from its mouth. It laughs at this and the sound reverberates across the hall.

Gerry shakes his head, feeling his own stomach roil with nausea. “I can’t, I can’t- t-take me home, right now. I need a door, that’s what you do, isn’t it?”

Michael frowns, eyes drooping in a way that makes it look almost sad. It can’t feel emotion, though, can it? Gerry dreads to think what might happen if it can. A door appears beside it and Gerry lunges toward it, but Michael is suddenly in the way. 

It doesn’t look at Gerry as it stands in front of the door. He doesn’t understand, why make the door, then block it? What was the point? It’s biting its lip in a very familiar way, and Gerry finds himself needing to avert his gaze as well.

“Be in touch, won’t you?” it says, and opens the door for him.

*

Gerry doesn’t want to think about the fact that the thing he’d been ignoring for months is _Michael_. Well, it isn’t his Michael, at least not anymore. Gerry doesn’t want to believe what it’d said about it being what Michael Shelley had ‘become,’ but he can see no way around it. If it’s lying there’s no way to know what the truth is, and if it’s telling the truth, well… Gerry doesn’t know.

He’s been wallowing in his own misery for months now. And now something is finally, finally, different, he just doesn’t know how to feel. It looks like Michael, if you stretched him like soft dough and fed him through a shredder and tried to piece him back together. That is to say it doesn’t look like Michael, but it can’t not look like him, either. It’s Michael but… distorted. It acts like Michael, too. Whether this is because part of it once was Michael, or it’s acting that way to trick him, Gerry doesn’t know. Gerry just doesn’t fucking know.

But if it were trying to trick him, the end goal would have been to get him into its corridors, and it had that. And then it let him go.

Gerry shakes the thoughts out of his head, it hurts too much to think about right now; he’s on a job.

He’s staking out an abandoned department store in north London. It’s nearly midnight, and Gerry knows there’s a fight club in action down there. He just needs the leader to come out, so he can have a little chat about a book. He’s been following Fabian Naumova for about a week now, mostly to distract him from what had happened in the corridors, but also because he has a Leitner; and a really bad one at that.

An hour later, roughly twenty men come out of the store. They’re all beaten and bloody, but none of them look like they didn’t come here exactly for that reason. Two men hang back as the others leave. One of them is Fabian, and he’s holding a book. He beckons to the other man to join him by the door. There is a small discussion. Fabian flips casually through the book. He then reaches in and pulls out a knife and cuts the other man’s throat with enough force that his head damn near comes off. He stabs at the other man over and over, even after he is quite clearly dead. He then wipes the blade clean and walks on.

 _Right,_ Gerry thinks, _I need to rethink my game plan._

*

Michael feels a knock at its door. It turns to Maggot, who is napping on the carpet of the corridors, a bright pink, today. “Who could that be, Maggot?” It claps his hands together and opens the door, its smile promptly dropping.

A man stands at its threshold. He’s about 50 and looks very confused. Michael frowns: it forgot it’d left a door in the hallway of a residential building. “Oh, uh, sorry. I thought this was my flat?”

“Oh, it is! Come in!” Michael ushers the man inside, and disinterestedly watches the man’s face contort in horror and confusion as he wanders the corridors for a few days. Michael sighs, “I thought it was Gerry, Maggot, I got all excited, didn’t I?”

*

Gerry would rather die than admit it, but he needs help. And there’s only one place he thinks he might get it from. He knocks on the yellow door. There’s no answer. _What the fuck?_ Gerry thinks, _Michael said to be in touch, surely, he should answer his own goddamned door?_

He tries the knob, and it turns easily, unlocked. He steps through, and he’s in the corridors. They’re the same as before, but this time the carpet is a garish green and the walls are a navy blue. There’s also a man here. Not a not-Michael thing, but a normal person. He’s sweating profusely and looks like he’s been walking for days.

“Oi!” Gerry says. The man looks up and starts hurrying toward him. “Get out.” He jerks his thumb at the door that is still behind him and watches the man leave without saying anything.

Michael appears shortly. It’s looking more human today. It’s still much taller and thinner than Gerry, but the body is proportionate, and its hands aren’t huge and bony. Gerry’s having trouble looking at it. It looks so much like Michael now. 

“Gerry!” it exclaims, a delighted smile on its face. “I was just having a snack, what can I do for you?”

It hurts to look at it, smiling so humanly. “I think you can do something for me.”

It pouts, then laughs that bubbling, distorted chuckle, “You’re using me, Gerry. You didn’t want to see me?”

“No.” Gerry says. He’s not sure it’s true.

It purses its lips, and to its credit, looks legitimately put-out. “Fine. What do you want?”

“You, uh, take people, don’t you? Like you took that man, just now?”

“Yes,” it says warily.

“Could you, I don’t know, take a bad person? An avatar? Or do you have to only take innocent people or something?”

It laughs in surprise, “Innocent people? That’s a new one.” It laughs long enough for Gerry’s temples to start throbbing. “Ah, yes, I could take a ‘bad’ person, I think. Some avatars taste rather nasty, though, like that Peter Lukas, he tasted like off fish. But yes, I could take someone for you. For a price.”

 _Peter Lukas?_ Question for another time, he thinks, then sighs, “What price?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I’ll decide later!”

“No deal, then. I’m not owing you a favour,” Gerry crosses his arms and frowns as the amusement stays put on its face.

“Alright, Gerry, I’ll do it for free. Because I li-, hmm, because I _tolerate_ you.” It steps closer to him and is delighted when he doesn’t take a step back in turn.

Gerry almost smiles, it can see it happening behind his eyes before he decides not to let it show on his face. “Fabian Naumov.”

“Hm?” Michael blinks.

“The guy I need you to, uh, take.”

“Oh, of course.”

*

Gerry would like to be able to say that that was a one-time thing. He would like to say that he asked Michael to eat one guy, then he never saw it again, and he moved on with his life, and he wasn’t sad or confused any more. He would like to say that, but that would be lying, and lying is Michael’s thing, not his.

It happens many more times though. And Michael never asks anything of Gerry in return. This should be making Gerry very nervous, why is it just doing what Gerry wants, what can it possibly be gaining from that? Gerry should be nervous; but he isn’t. Seeing Michael is just a normal thing, now. And Michael is always so happy to see him. 

Sometimes Michael looks weird, like it looks like Michael, but distorted, with the big hands and oddly thin torso. Other times it looks almost exactly like Michael, with blond ringlets falling onto its shoulders and gap-toothed grin making Gerry’s insides feel warm and wrong, wringing its hands, just like he used to.

Gerry never forgets what it is though. For all it looks like Michael Shelley, it isn’t. and that fact is simply not forgettable. But Gerry finds himself not minding Michael despite all this. Spending any amount of time with it is confusing and almost always gives him a headache, but Gerry doesn’t hate it. In fact, if he’s really, really, drunk, he might admit to himself that he kind of enjoys Michael’s company. 

He wonders if this makes him a bad person. Michael eats people, for god’s sake. But, now that Gerry has started seeing it regularly, it’s only been bad people it’s eating, that he knows of. People Gerry would have disposed of anyway.

Gerry thinks… he thinks, he owes it to Michael to do this. The Michael that became this Michael, he means. If there’s even a sliver of Michael Shelley left in there, Gerry is not going to abandon it, however hard it may be at times to reconcile the twisting shapes of this thing, with the gentle beauty that was his Michael.

*

Michael feels rather content at the moment. Gerry talks to it regularly, suggests new places to eat. It’s rather nice of him, bringing it food, kind of. Almost like making it dinner. How romantic. _People in romantic relationships kiss each other, though_ , Michael reminds itself sourly. Fuck, but it wants to kiss Gerry. He doesn’t think Gerry would like that though. The idea that Gerry would cringe away from it is a saddening and persistent concept, one that would keep Michael up at night, if it needed to sleep.

Yes, Michael is feeling content. But it isn’t satisfied. It thinks it’s just going to have to embed itself deeper in Gerry’s life, just so it can be with him more often.

*

Gerry gets home from a day stalking through the antique bookstores and finds Maggot greeting him at the door. His door, not Michael’s, he had definitely just entered his apartment. So why is Maggot here; he lives in the corridors now.

He walks into the living room to find Michael’s door wide open in front of the telly. He turns around to find Michael in the kitchen, making two cups of tea at the kettle. Gerry’s heart jumps at this, an achingly familiar scene. 

He clears his throat, “Michael, why are you in my apartment?”

Michael laughs, and the sound is no different than in the corridors, but it hurts less, Gerry thinks, in thei-, no, his, flat. “It’s Michael’s apartment, technically.”

“Yeah, Michael’s, not yours.” Gerry’s heart drops whenever he’s forced to acknowledge the fact that Michael isn’t Michael anymore. Gerry drops his bag by the door and goes to sit on the couch. “Can you get rid of your door, please, I can’t see the telly.”

The door is gone when Michael sits down next to him and passes him a cup of tea. Gerry sips it tentatively. It tastes like battery acid and feet.

“Michael, what the fuck did you put in this?”

Michael looks thoughtful and drains the mug in one go. When it’s done its face briefly twitches into a 2D rendition of itself. It blinks back to normal and giggles, “I have no clue!” It beams at him.

Gerry sighs and heads into the kitchen for a real cup of tea. Michael follows him, looking confused. “Was it not good?”

“No, Michael, it was delicious, that’s why I’m pouring it down the sink!”

It narrows its eyes, “Don’t humans usually consume things that are delicious?”

“Yes, they do. I was being sarcastic.”

Michael smiles at him playfully, and chuckles, “Oh, Gerry, you are so rude.” 

“Yep,” Gerry says.

Michael moves around him to lean against the wall beside him. “You kissed me here for the first time.”

Gerry chokes on air, “No, uh,” he clears his throat, “ _You_ kissed _me_. He kissed me.”

Michael looks ecstatic at the mistake Gerry just made, eyeing him with what Gerry could only describe as hunger. Gerry knows he should be afraid. He also knows that Michael won’t eat him; it would have done that already. As far as he knows, the Distortion’s MO had never been to befriend its victims first. Or try to seduce them.

Gerry looks at Michael. It’s looking rather human today. Its eyes are grey, just like Michael’s, its skin looks soft, and its golden curls are twisting like usual, reflecting the afternoon sun. Fuck. Gerry wants to kiss a monster.

“Why don’t you?”

“Did I say that out loud?”

“No,” it smiles cheekily, and reaches its normal looking hands up to hold Gerry’s face. They feel smooth, like leather, and heavy. They do not feel like hands. It leans in too slowly, glancing between his eyes and lips as it does. 

Gerry has less patience than an eldritch horror, _how about that_ , he thinks, as he balls Michael’s sweater in his hands, and tugs it down to smash their mouths together. Kissing Michael feels… electric. But not like: wow, there’s a lot of chemistry there, more like: Gerry is being electrocuted. Gerry will not lie though; it doesn’t feel half bad.

Gerry slides his hands into Michael’s hair, and the curls twist themselves around his fingers as he deepens the kiss. He feels Michael’s tongue brush against his, and Michael’s hands move down to grip his waist, and a hot rush of arousal floods downwards.

Panic shoots through him as he remembers who he’s with, or _what_ he’s with and he pushes himself away from Michael roughly. Michael looks a little loose around the edges, like holding itself together is taking some real effort. It looks surprised, dazed.

Gerry shakes his head and flees the apartment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for all the lovely comments guys! feel free to add more, give kudos, and come talk to me @theroswellcrashsite


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> time apart :( and the return of daisy and basira

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning for potential child endangerment :/

Gerry stumbles down the steps of the apartment building, nearly tripping onto the sidewalk. He can’t see straight, the pavement lurches and spins underneath him. He loses his balance. The ground comes up to meet him so quickly, he barely has time to put his hands out to break his fall. Gerry rolls over and looks at the sky, and immediately has to close his eyes. It’s a mess of shapes and colours and none of it makes sense at all. His head feels like it’s been stuffed with cotton and thinking through it is like trying to swim through jelly. He tries to stand up, but the street still rocks underneath him. He needs to sit down. He needs to… he doesn’t even know. How can he know how to fix a situation when you can’t even focus on the situation because it hurts too much?

Gerry puts his hand out to steady himself against a building. The brick wiggles beneath his hand as he looks around. The world is rippling. Specks of light fire up, then disappear, and spring through the air like tics. The sky is all at once much too close and not there at all. Gerry hasn’t tripped on acid since the 90’s but he’s sure even that never felt like this.

Kissing Michael had been… Well it had been pretty wonderful; Gerry won’t lie about that. And he had been craving that connection, ever since… ever since Michael had left for Sannikova. Not even the kissing, though, Gerry just misses the casual physical contact that Michael had always given to him without a second thought. Is it so bad, to just want to hold a hand every now and again? Is that so unrealistic? Well, apparently so, because Michael has knives for hands now, which is really fucking inconvenient. If this is what kissing Michael is going to be like every time, well, he’s going to have to find a new monster to fall in love with, because this just isn’t sustainable.

*

Daisy and Basira are patrolling in Central London at 2 am on a Wednesday morning. They’ve had an uneventful night, with only a few drunk folks to deal with. They are both craving some entertainment. It’s when they round the corner onto a residential street that they first spot him.

“Is that that goth guy that we’ve picked up a couple of times?”

“Yeah I think it is.”

They watch for a quiet few seconds as he bounces between the walls of buildings, streetlamps, and the sidewalk. “What the fuck is wrong with him?” Basira says.

“I don’t know. We should go check it out.”

“Daisy, you can’t arrest him if he’s not doing anything illegal.”

“Nothing illegal? Basira he looks like he swallowed his whole stash.”

“Yeah, that’s true. Just pull up beside him.”

Daisy swings the wheel around so that they are slowly rolling along beside him. Basira rolls down her window, “Hey, goth guy, are you alright?”

The man jumps a foot in the air when she speaks, and lands on his ass on the ground. They share a look before watching him stumble to his feet and approach the car. He grips the top of the door where Basira is peering at him and sways on the spot.

A deep breath, “Listen, officer. Don’t _ever_ fall in love with a monster. Shit gets fucking… fucking, like, weird and shit.” He waves his hand vaguely, nearly toppling himself over.

“Alright, step away from the vehicle.”

The man stumbles away to lean on a pole as Basira steps onto the sidewalk. “Okay, mate, just take a seat, there.” He slides down the lamppost to sit on the pavement, head lolling back against it. “Now, just breathe into this for me, right, thanks. Okay, Daisy, he’s sober.”

“No way,” Daisy says, looking confused.

“Alright, now, put that in your mouth, yep, like that, nope, only in the mouth, thank you.” She rattles the drug test until the liquid turns purple. “He’s clean, too.”

“What the fuck is his problem, then? Is he having a mental break?”

The goth laughs uproariously at this, nodding exaggeratedly, “I kissed the throat of delusion!”

Basira looks at Daisy with wide eyes, “ _Okay_ , Mr. Keay, we’re taking you to the hospital.”

*

Michael is _freaking out_. Gerry kissed it and it was amazing and beautiful and Michael hasn’t known such joy since, well, ever, because before Gerry, joy wasn’t a concept it could realistically grasp. But Gerry had run away from it. That could only mean he didn’t like it, right? That’s what humans do when they don’t like something, they run away from it.

“Oh, Maggie! I knew this would happen! I try to get close to him and he realises he doesn’t like me. He’s never going to want to see me again. He probably thinks I’m evil. He probably hates me: evil Michael, with its evil kisses.” Michael begins to cry at this, tears streaming out of its eyes and floating into the air around it. Its hiccupping sobs bounce off the corridors, and Maggot bristles at the sound.

Maggot jumps into its lap and makes a sympathetic noise. “Have you ever been in love, Maggot? It’s quite terrible. You have to put yourself out there. But I can’t do that! I’m unknowable! I’m unknowable; I can’t be known! Feels so good to let him know me, though.” It giggles, “Feels- well, felt, good to kiss him.”

Michael sighs and runs its hands over Maggot’s fur. Short strands of hair fly away from the cat as Michael’s fingers slice through the animal’s dark coat. “Oh, sorry,” it says, and forcibly softens its fingers until the cat is purring again.

*

Gerry spends a week away from Michael. He can’t face it, not after running away from its embrace like the coward he is. He can’t stop thinking about it, though. Can’t stop thinking about how he had wanted to lean in to it, let its hair trap him in its spiralling grip, let it stick its tongue in his mouth and pull him close enough so they’d be pressed together… _No! Nope! Will not think about it! That thing might be as close to Michael as I’m gonna get, but you can’t just go about, thinking monsters are sexy, wanting it to… no. nope. Done. Not thinking about it._

Gerry needs to cool down. After that one single kiss, he had been royally fucked over, and had to spend a night in the hospital, where doctors puzzled over what to do with him. He can’t just go and do it again!

Gerry needs to go to the least sexy place he can find. Oh! He knows, The Magnus Institute. He’s been meaning to find another Leitner to burn anyway, so he might as well do some very unsexy research. Whilst avoiding being seen; he’s still banned.

He’s rifling through a stack of paper on an unoccupied desk when he’s caught. A voice is pointedly cleared behind him, and he turns, expecting to have to fight down the bubbling rage inside him at having to see Gertrude, when instead he finds himself looking at a short, dark-skinned man. He looks tired and dishevelled, with his long, prematurely greying hair tossed up into a bun. He does not look happy to find someone skulking in the archives. 

“Uhhh, hi,” Gerry says, keeping his voice neutral, “Who are you?”

“Jonathan Sims, head archivist. Who might you be?” he doesn’t _sound_ happy to find someone skulking in the archives, either.

“Gerry. Um, sorry, did you say head archivist? Where’s Gertrude?”

The man frowns warily, “She disappeared, presumed dead. Can you please tell why you’re the second weirdo I’ve found lurking around down here?”

“Second? Who- oh, never mind. Gertrude is dead, wow, that’s, uh. Hm,” Gerry stops flipping through the stack of papers. Gertrude is dead. He wonders who the medal should go to.

“I’m… sorry for your loss?” Jonathan says, tentatively.

Gerry laughs, “No, that’s alright, really. I’ll get out of your hair, then, Jon.”

He brushes past the baffled archivist and leaves the institute, a few documents shoved in his back pocket.

Gerry looks them over briefly. It’s a statement of one Murray Kosovich, regarding a Leitner that appeared in Manchester in 2005, allegedly possessing the ability to vomit up dirt and cement and soil until whoever reads it is completely buried. Attached is a profile of a man who was last seen with the book, and a copy of multiple police reports connected to the man. “Jesus,” Gerry mutters to himself, “this is a man who deserves to get eaten. And I know just the mons-.”

 _Nope! I’m not thinking about it, I’m not thi- I shouldn’t thi- oh, fuck it,_ He sighs aloud, Gerry is really tired of monitoring his thoughts, _I’m going to go find it._

*

With no grumpy goth to distract it, Michael starts getting very hungry again. With Gerry around, Michael could just look at the firm set of his jaw and his black-rimmed eyes and feel full up with contentment, even if he was scowling in distaste at something it had said or done. It wouldn’t need to take someone into its hallways for weeks at a time. Now, only a few days after Gerry had kissed it and ran away, Michael is feeling ravenous.

The first suitable victim it finds is a middle-aged mother of three. She’s buying a hit of heroin from her dealer, and she’s just shot up in her car with her 5-year-old in the back seat, when she suddenly notices a door in the alley she had just come from. She doesn’t hesitate to follow the impulse to go look at it, leaving her kid in the car behind her, wailing in its booster seat.

She steps readily into Michael’s winding corridors and promptly starts wandering deeper and deeper into the spiral. Michael soaks in the fear she’s emitting for a while, scrabbling around in the hallways until she finally breaks down and sobs on the floor. Michael gets rather bored at this point and steps out to go harass someone else. 

_Oh, I know!_ Michael thinks, _I’ll go harass the Archivist! The one who sacrificed Michael!_

Michael finds a quiet corner of its hallways, far from the wailing woman, and opens its door into the ceiling above Gertrude Robinson’s office. It looks down into it and sees a man sitting there in her place, looking for all the world like he belongs there. Michael squints at him. The man is short, much shorter than it, or Gerry, and he’s rather thin too. He looks underfed and under-rested as he reads a statement into his tape recorder.

Michael is rather disappointed that Gertrude isn’t there. It thinks that if anyone deserves to be haunted by the faces of her past, then it would be Gertrude Robinson, head archivist of the Magnus Institute. It would be rather difficult to trick her into its maze, though; she was always overly-competent in avoiding her end… until now?

It tunes in to what the man is saying just as he is finishing his statement.

“Statement ends,” he says with a sigh. “I have had Tim and Sasha do some further research into this matter. It seems that the statement of Lydia Nathan is, predictably, completely unverifiable.” The man sighs once more, long-suffering this time, “I only wish that my predecessor, Gertrude Robinson, had left the archives in a more helpful way before she passed.”

Michael’s eyes widen. _Passed? As in dead?_

“Good Riddance!” Michael says out loud, now fully manifested inside the man’s office.

“AH!” the Archivist yells. “Who the hell are you?!”

“I’m Michael! Who are you?”

“Uh, J-Jonathan Sims. How did you get in here?” Having gotten over his initial shock, the man seems far more annoyed than scared. _Oh, this one won’t last a week,_ Michael thinks.

Michael doesn’t answer so Jon says instead, “Didn’t you use to work here?”

Michael pretends to survey the room, taking in all the shelves and bad lighting, “Nope! Well, I better be going, be seeing you, Archivist.”

“Wait!” Michael pauses. “Why are you here?”

Michael chuckles, if only to watch the man wince as he tries to understand the sound, “Well, I was just bored, actually. But now I think I might be getting food poisoning from this woman I just ate, so I suppose I’ll be going now.”

“ _Excuse_ me?” Michael hears the man say as it steps through a door.

That’s better. It feels rather weird being in the Institute since becoming Michael. Before, Michael Shelley would have considered the place a second home, but now that it is Michael, feeling the Eye try to know it was really very uncomfortable, given its very nature is unknowable.

Michael busies itself with watching the woman scream and cry the drugs out of her system, getting more and more annoyed with the sounds as they grate against the walls, until it feels a knock on its door. The woman hears the knock too and stops screaming with a shuddering gasp. She runs toward the door as Gerry steps through it, calling its name. Maggot dashes out the door before it can close, and the woman runs through as well, but she doesn’t run into the street Gerry had just come from, she runs into a different part of the hallways. Michael shuts the door with a giggle as her mind folds in on itself with the impossibility of still being in the same corridor.

“Gerry!” Michael says, elated to see the dark clad man again. “What brings you by?”

Michael’s smile drops when it realises that Gerry is _scowling_ at it. “What the fuck, Michael? I’m gone for a week and you’re already back to taking innocent people?”

“No! She wasn’t one of those!” Michael steps toward Gerry, but keeps its distance, not wanting to scare him away again, like it did a week ago. Michael _would_ really like to kiss him again though. But it’ll wait.

Gerry shakes his head, face devoid of amusement, “You’re unbelievable.” He leaves through the door he came through, and Michael follows without question.

*

“Daisy!” Basira shouts as she sees a cat sprint across the road in front of their patrol car.

Daisy slams on the brakes with a curse, and they both watch as the cat trots lazily down the sidewalk. Then they hear the shouting. They turn in their seats, stopped in the middle of the street in a quiet suburban neighbourhood, to see two figures on the other side of the road.

One of them is Gerard Keay. He’s looking a little more put together than when they last saw him. At least this time he’s wearing a long dark coat and a ripped black sweater. It had been minus 10 degrees the other day and he had only been wearing a dirty band T-shirt. He looks rather angry with the other person he’s talking to. Or… maybe angry is the wrong word, Basira thinks, because what actually shows on his face is a boiling mixture of hurt and guilt and wanting.

The other figure is tall and blond. That’s about all Basira can properly discern without her head starting to pound, despite the couple arguing in broad day light.

“What the _fuck_ is he up to now?” Daisy mutters.

“I don’t even know what I’m looking at,” Basira says. “Should we go see what’s up?”

“No, I want to see how this plays out.”

She does love her dramas. Basira had listened to enough hours of _The Archers_ by now to know. Daisy silently rolls down their windows to let the shouted words filter in.

“You ate an innocent woman, Michael! You know who eats people, Michael? Monsters! Monsters do!”

The other figure reels back, “OH, she was hardly innocent, Gerry. She did heroin when she was pregnant; all three times! I might be an eldritch horror, but even I know you shouldn’t do _that_.”

Gerry purses his lips, “Ok, that’s a fair point, you shouldn’t endanger the lives of children.”

“Well…”

Gerry’s jaw drops, “Fuck off! You did _not_ take a child!”

“No!” Michael shouts back, “Not since I’m Michael!”

Basira and Daisy squint quizzically at each other.

“Well,” Gerry begins, loudly. “Good, then,” he finishes lamely.

There’s an awkward silence that stretches for a little too long. Basira is about to say something when the tall figure speaks quietly.

“You ran away from me.”

A look of guilt passes over Gerry’s face, but it’s gone just as quick as it came. “You kissed me!”

“No, you kissed _me,_ Gerry.”

“And it made me all, fucking, weird and shit, Michael! I had to spend a night in the hospital because of you!”

A look of understanding passes between the two officers.

“I didn’t mean to, Gerry, I was just so overwhelmed, you know how I feel around you,” the thing (man?); Basira isn’t sure, reaches out toward Gerry at this, and through the windshield of the car, its hands look _weird_ ; distorted and wobbly and bulbous. Basira shakes her head and the image is gone.

Gerard smacks the things hands away, “Don’t touch me!”

There’s a moment of stillness that holds even the two women: a stunned silence. Then the tall man turns quickly into a door that had definitely not been there a moment ago. Gerry looks stricken, and panicked, before he shakes himself and bolts through the door after it.

Daisy turns to Basira with her eyebrows raised and mouth pulled down in a look of complete bafflement. 

The silence holds for a few seconds longer before Basira snorts a laugh, “Get you a man who will send you into a hallucinatory stupor when he kisses you.”

They laugh for a good long minute before quieting again.

“We should’ve done something.”

“Yeah, probably,” Basira points out the window, “You could take the cat in for questioning, if you like.”

*

Michael’s door closes with a slam. Neither of them speaks for a moment that stretches out into eternity. Gerry doesn’t want to be the first one to say something, but he has no way of knowing if he has more resolve than an ancient thing like Michael. If this was _Michael_ , Gerry wouldn’t have to wait, Michael would already be talking, trying to smooth the situation over as best he could. There wouldn’t be a situation to begin with, if it was Michael. But this is Michael, and Gerry has to throw the rule book out the window.

“Michael. I’m- uh, I’m sorry.” He winces at the vulnerability in his voice.

Michael isn’t facing him, it’s facing the wall, pretending to be very interested in one of the paintings. “Sorry for what?”

“For, for slapping you. I didn’t mean to, I just- I’m sorry.”

Michael bites its lip, and in that movement, Gerry sees his Michael. “Why did you follow me?”

Gerry huffs a laugh, “Michael, I could never leave you when you’re upset.”

Michael doesn’t respond.

“Why did you leave the door there?”

“What?”

“Why did you leave your door there? Where I could use it, if you didn’t want me to follow you?”

“I never said I didn’t want you to follow me, Gerry,” It laughs sadly, and it echoes flatly, without the reverberating delight it is usually so full of. “Gerry, I know that you loved Michael Shelley-.”

“Don’t,” Gerry says shortly. He doesn’t want this conversation, not now, not ever.

“I still have that love, Gerry. I remember it; how we shared it.”

Gerry chokes on tears that had come up very suddenly, and the sound he makes causes Michael’s head to snap up to look at him. “We didn’t share anything, it wasn’t _you_ , it was _him_.”

Michael looks hurt, its mouth dropping open and its grey eyes shining.

“I was going to marry him.” Gerry says this quietly, letting the words soak into the air until there’s no space left in the room for anything but Gerry and Michael.

“ _WHAT_?” Michael shouts. “We were going to get married?”

“Yes, Michael, I was going to marry you. You wanted that right? You said so… that night? In bed?” Gerry’s face flushes recalling how intimate they had once been. It feels like nothing could bridge the distance between them now.

“I remember,” Michael says, coming closer, slowly, smiling, “how could I forget?”

Gerry’s lip wobbles embarrassingly as Michael puts its hand on his cheek, and fresh tears form in his eyes. “I really loved him, Michael.”

He watches its face scrunch up as it fights back its own tears, “You fell in love with a seed, Gerry. Why can’t you love what it grew into?”

Gerry tracks the tears rolling down Michael’s cheeks, gliding over the planes of its face and dropping into mid-air suspension, just another reminder how different Michael’s become now.

Gerry heaves a hiccupping gasp as the dam behind his eyes breaks and he falls into Michael’s arms, “I do, I do, I do, Michael, and I _can’t_ , I don’t know how, I don’t know _how,_ and I can’t because I spent my whole life destroying things like you and if I change that now, my whole life will have been for nothing but if I’d never met you my life would be worthless anyway and I don’t know how because this is all so confusing; _you’re_ so confusing and Michael I am so tired and I need this to be easier.”

Michael squeezes Gerry into a tight embrace, surprised at the outburst. It buries its face in Gerry’s hair and holds him until his sobs subside into a repetitive murmuring, “I need this, Michael, I need you…”

Michael tilts Gerry’s head back gently so it can look him in the eye. Michael brushes its thumbs over Gerry’s face so the dark stains of his mascara swirl away into the air around them. It presses their foreheads together and closes its eyes. Michael doesn’t want to see Gerry like this anymore, but it needs to ask one more thing.

“Gerry?” it whispers.

Gerry covers its hands where they rest on his face with his own, eye tattoos staring out at them, and kisses its hands tenderly. “Michael.”

“You said,” it takes a deep shuddering breath, “Before, you said, that you would love me, however much I might change.”

Gerry’s face falls further, and he lets go of Michael’s hands. Michael thinks for a moment that this is it. It’s brought up the one detail that it knows Gerry can’t look past: that its too different to Michael Shelley; Michael has changed too much. It thinks Gerry is going to stand up and leave, and Michael manifests a door to let him, it won’t make it easier to keep him prisoner. But Gerry doesn’t leave, he just puts his hands on either side of Michael’s face and turns it, so it has to look into his eyes. Gerry speaks earnestly, “I am so sorry, Michael. I’ve been terrible to you.”

“Were you wrong?” Michael asks.

Gerry looks confused. “What? Was I wrong about what?”

“Were you wrong, when you said you would love me, however different I became? Do you not love me, how I am now?”

Gerry looks both crestfallen and elated, “Michael.” He strokes his face and Michael wonders if this is some kind of torture, to drag the pause out so long. “Yes, I love you.”

Michael whimpers and surges forward, bringing their lips together and trying its damnedest to hold itself together so Gerry doesn’t get high on its fumes again. Gerry grunts at the force of the kiss and brings his hands up to the back of Michael’s neck to hold them upright. The kiss is tender and sweet, and Gerry is pretty sure that they’re both crying, because it tastes really salty, too. When Michael slips its tongue into his mouth, he gently breaks the kiss, feeling much too emotionally drained for any of that business.

Michael buries its face in Gerry’s shoulder, emitting a rumbling noise not unlike purring, that echoes around them and makes itself home in Gerrys chest. “Marry me, Gerry,” It says.

Gerry laughs wetly, “How about a date first, huh?”

Michael considers this and draws Gerry into another firm hug, “Okay, Gerard Keay, I’ll date you.”

“What do you want to do?” Gerry asks.

“Huh,” Michael says, voice muffled in Gerry’s hair.

“What should we do, for our first date?”

Michael pulls back and looks thoughtful. Then a glow of mischief enters its eyes as it says, “I have the perfect idea.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one was hard, my dudes, hope you enjoyed. kudos and comment if you feel so inclined :)))


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Date time baby.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some homophobic slurs and discussions of domestic abuse in this one. Stay safe and enjoy :)

Gerry is ordering fish and chips. Michael said that it remembers Michael thinking this was the best fish and chip place in London. Gerry hadn’t wanted to argue, even though he knows that Michael’s memory isn’t the sharpest, and Gerry _knows_ that the best fish and chip place is Seashack around the corner. Gerry can’t bring himself to mind anyway, because he’s going on a _date_ with the _Distortion_ , and besides, this place is cheaper.

“Would you like any sauce with that?” the lady behind the counter asks.

“Yes, thanks,” Gerry says.

A disembodied voice reverberates gleefully around the room, _Gerry, get another chips._

Stacey, her name-tag reads, looks rattled. “Uh, actually, can I get another medium chips with that?”

“Wh- uh, yeah, sure,” she says shakily.

Gerry collects his order and leaves through the yellow door that stands in place of the usual glass one. Michael is waiting for him in its hallways.

“Can you even eat food?” Gerry says, handing Michael the extra chips.

“We will find out, won’t we?” it says, and empties a handful of chips into its mouth. 

“So what’s this ‘entertainment,’ you’ve been talking about?” Gerry says, and takes a seat next to Michael where its now sitting cross legged on the floor.

“You’ll see,” it says, and pushes open a door in front of it. Behind it is a bird’s eye view of a dark room in the Archives. Gerry thinks the door must be in the ceiling of what is now Jonathan Sims' office. The man in question sits at his desk, periodically picking up and putting down various pieces of paper, scribbling notes into a book at his side, hurriedly erasing them, and writing more.

“Oh, so it’s take your boyfriend to work day? We’re harassing the Archival staff?” 

Michael nods eagerly, grinning. “Watch this.” It opens a door to its right, which Gerry can see opens below, in the office, just beside the large desk. Michael snatches a piece of paper that Jon had just put down, and quickly closes the door again. They watch as Jon puts down his pencil and casts around his desk for the document, lifting up stacks of loose files and peering under the table.

Gerry snickers. “Okay, yeah this is pretty funny.”

Michael nods, enjoying the soft look of amusement on Gerry’s face. He gestures at Michael with a piece of fish, “Want some?”

“No, I prefer the chips, thanks,” it says, shovelling the rest of its chips into its over-wide mouth.

“Oh, take his eraser, I know how I hate to lose those when I’m drawing.”

Michael opens the door again and swiftly pinches Jon’s eraser from where it had been lying just beside his elbow. They watch with bated breath for him to realise it’s disappeared. Jon puts his pencil down again and put his hand where the eraser had been, looking over in surprise when it’s not there.

Gerry laughs loudly, and Michael joins in with a short giggle. “How does he not notice the door?”

“I’m the throat of delusion, baby!”

Jon looks around himself again, getting off his chair and searching the floor thoroughly. He sits back down and puts his head in his hands.

“Aww, I feel bad now. Go on, give him back his stuff, we’ll go bug someone else.”

Michael drops the eraser and piece of paper into the open door so that it falls onto Jon’s desk, right in front of him. The door slams closed just as he begins to look up. It opens again above the break room. 

A stab of longing lances through Gerry. He clears his throat, “Michael used to make me tea here all the time. Do you remember?”

Michael looks thoughtful. “Hm, yes, I do. Look, she’s using your cup.” It points through the door at a tall olive-skinned woman with glasses. “Oh- I met her the other day!”

“You met her? Why?”

“I wanted to show her how to get rid of Jane’s worms.”

“Really? That’s nice of you,” Gerry says, smirking and nudging Michael in the side.

Michael wrinkles its nose, “Not that nice- It’s just that it’s dreadfully boring when they’re so _completely_ ignorant.”

Gerry side-eyes it for a moment, before poking it in the side again, grinning, “You did something nice!” he sing-songs.

“Gerry, stop! I’m the avatar of madness, I’m not nice!” it whines and grabs Gerry around the middle, leaning in to kiss him soundly on the mouth, shutting him up. It pulls back to look Gerry in the eyes. “Is this a good… _date?_ ”

Gerry brushes Michael’s hair out of its face, smiling softly, and kisses it again, long and slow. When he pulls back, the edges of Michael are smudged and out of focus. “Yes, Michael, it is a good date. Good job.”

“So we can get married now?”

Gerry laughs.

*

“So,” Michael starts, pretending to read through a magazine it’d found. “We’ve been on a date. You still haven’t explained why that doesn’t mean we can get married now.”

Gerry watches with amusement as it feigns interest in whatever celebrity gossip articles it’s running its eyes over. It’s trying to act casual, but Gerry knows that for some reason, Michael has become very invested in marrying him. “It doesn’t work like that, Michael.”

It throws its hands in the air, magazine forgotten, “Then how _does_ it work, Gerry?”

“Well, usually, people will go on regular dates for a couple years, then if all goes well, they get engaged, and plan a wedding, and get married and live happily ever after.”

“ _Years?_ Gerry, that’s such a long time. How many dates?” 

Gerry laughs, “What?”

“How many dates? What number? If we do that many dates really quickly, we can get married, like, next week!”

“It’s not just about that! It’s about getting to know each other, and loving each other, and all that shit.”

“Well, we love each other, don’t we?”

Gerry definitely doesn’t blush at the casual way it says this. “Of course! But this is all still pretty new, right? I mean, you’ve been Michael for only less than half a year, so far. Most people date for 5 times that long.”

“You knew Michael ages before that, though,” Michael says, pouting.

“You’re different now though, I have to get to know you all over again.”

“ _Have_ to? Oh, so I’m a chore now, am I? Just another thing to cross off Gerry’s to-do list?” It falls dramatically onto the couch, arm covering its eyes and faced turned away from Gerry.

“No, come on, don’t be silly,” Gerry moves its legs from where they hang over the armrest so that he can sit next to it, “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that getting married is a lot of work, and all married people hate each other anyway.”

“What?” It sits up, “Hate each other? Why do they get married, then?”

“Because they love each other.”

Michael squints at him, “You people are so weird. I don’t know why you are all so concerned with going insane, you already don’t make any sense.”

*

It’s a cloudy Sunday when they’re sitting in the living room again. Michael is sitting in the chair by the window, watching people walk past on the street and stroking Maggot, who sits in its lap. Gerry is smoking on the couch, half paying attention to what’s on the tv, and half watching Michael.

“Do you like the weather like this, Michael?”

Michael hums thoughtfully. “Yes, people are more likely to do something stupid in this weather.”

Gerry smiles, and Michael turns to look at him. Gerry offers it his cigarette. Michael takes the cigarette gingerly from his fingers and looks at it for a moment. Then it puts the whole thing in its mouth.

“Wh-.”

Michael swallows, like it didn’t just put a cigarette in its mouth, like nothings out of the ordinary. Gerry supposes it isn’t really, Michael does all sorts of weird shit. Michael grins at him and smoke curls out from the gap in its teeth. Gerry laughs.

*

Michael has become rather adept at not sending Gerry into hallucinatory manic states when it kisses him. It has only happened once more since that first time, but at least Gerry hadn’t run away from it then. He had instead passed out for exactly one minute and 43 seconds, then promptly got up and took a shower with all his clothes on. Michael had been fretting over him through out all of this, but not really knowing what to do about it; it wasn’t around to see how it had played out the last time. In the end, Gerry had simply stared blankly at the telly for five hours before falling asleep and waking up fine, not remembering a single second from after Michael had kissed him.

About a month into what Michael has been insistently calling their courtship, Gerry thinks it is safe to say Michael has gotten quite good at kissing… quite good indeed.

Gerry moans against Michael’s mouth as it runs its forcibly softened fingertips down its spine. Gerry is sitting in its lap, and grinding firmly downward, winding his fingers in its hair and trailing kisses up and down Michael’s neck. Michael giggles a disorienting laugh and pulls Gerry’s hips closer, reaching for the belt around his waist.

“Woah, hey,” Gerry says, catching Michael’s hands before it can do anything.

“What?” Michael says, pouting. “You don’t want it?”

“Oh, I do, Michael, don’t worry about that. And it’s not that I don’t trust you not to chop my dick off,” Gerry is still peppering kisses across its face, “It’s just that… I don’t trust you not to chop my dick off.”

Michael is still pouting, “I’ll be careful, I promise.”

“That’s what you said before you gave me an impromptu hair cut last week.”

“I didn’t take that much off!” it says, running its hands through Gerry’s hair, tugging gently.

“Babe, you nearly made me look like Dora the Explorer.”

“Is she a friend of yours?”

This surprises a loud laugh out of Gerry, “I really can’t tell if you’re joking sometimes.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It leans back, sighing, and rests its hands on Gerry’s hips, “What do you want, then?”

Gerry smirks and grabs the hem of Michael’s sweater- the one it had stolen when Gerry was still grieving- and pulls it off of it in one smooth move. He puts a hand in the middle of Michael’s chest and pushes it down ‘til it’s lying flat on the bed. He lays himself over Michael and starts to place slow, wet, open-mouthed kisses against its throat, moving downward gradually.

“Just relax, I’ll take care of it,” he says.

Michael giggles softly, content, and does what he asks.

*

Lying in bed with Michael seems surreal after so many months without him. Different as it may be, it still feels like Michael. Some deep dark part of Gerry’s mind tells him that that’s what the Distortion wants him to think. That this is just some ridiculously drawn out long con, and that Michael will inevitably leave him, and Peter Lukas will finally take what’s his.

“Michael never thought any of this was real,” Michael says, simultaneously mirroring and pulling Gerry out of his own thoughts.

“Hm?” Gerry hums, shuffling closer.

“Michael Shelley tried very hard to convince himself that what we had was real, and that you loved him, and that he was worthy of that love in turn. But he never believed it, not for a second.”

Gerry feels cold. He had known Michael had major self-worth issues. He knew he struggled to come to terms with being loved. It was near-impossible to get the details from him, though, despite how hard Gerry tried.

“Who hurt him?” Gerry asks.

“What?” Michael says, broken from its reverie.

“What happened, for him to think that. Did someone hurt him?”

Michael looks thoughtful, like it’s very far away, remembering a different life, and, Gerry supposes, he is. “Michael had a friend when he was very young. They played together every day, in the woods where they were told not to go. One day, something like me took his friend, and it was as if he’d never existed. Michael saw him go through that door and never come out, and he ran home as fast as he could to tell his mother. She told him that that boy had never existed. Years, Michael spent, being told he was crazy. So many tests, the same tests, over and over, the same result. Schizophrenia. After such a long time, he began to believe it. Then he met Curtis Jana.”

Gerry felt something burning and protective wake inside him. He forced himself to remain quiet and listen to the rest.

“Michael was thirteen years old when he fell in love with Curtis Jana. He thought he was so cute and nice. Michael helped him with his math homework once, and Curtis _thanked_ him. Like Michael was worth speaking to. Like he wasn’t just the kid who watched his imaginary friend die. They grew up together. Michael watched Curtis hook up with and dump girl after girl, remaining the loyal ‘wingman,’ saying nothing. It wasn’t until their second year of university that something happened, so close were they that they’d gone to the same school. They were at a party and Curtis got drunk. When he got drunk, he got mean. Michael had seen this at many high school parties, and this time was no different. Curtis was Michael’s best friend, and he loved him, completely. In a back room at the party, Curtis kissed him. Neither of them was sober, but only one of them smelled like a distillery. Still, Michael thought it was the best moment of his life. He felt those fireworks he had always heard of; he felt his whole world turn inside out and, in that moment, with complete clarity, he saw his whole life out ahead of him. He _knew_ he was going to marry Curtis. He had always loved the idea of spending your life with your childhood sweetheart. It felt inevitable. Then Curtis struck him across the face. And that felt inevitable, too.”

Michael’s tone remained indifferent, its eyes distant, but its hand tightened around Gerry’s, and Gerry squeezed back, swallowing against the anger building inside of him.

“Curtis told him that he wasn’t a queer. That he wasn’t a skinny little faggot like Michael. And that he wouldn’t have Michael running around telling people of what had just happened. Curtis hit him again and asked if he understood. Michael was crying, and he said that he did, and through his tears he told Curtis he would do anything for him. And he would. He would; just to keep Curtis around, because he was the only one who ever believed him. They stayed together, in secret, for four years. Michael continued to watch Curtis sleep with girls and discard them the next day. He felt a shameful sort of pride about that- that he was the one who got to stay. Michael even got up the nerve to tell Curtis that he wasn’t a man. He told himself that Curtis loved him, non-binary or not, and that he would accept him because that’s what people who love you do. The morning after he told Curtis he used a whole bottle of concealer just to go to work. But Michael thought it was fine, that it was _just fine_ , because Curtis only hit him when Michael wasn’t what he wanted, when he didn’t do what he wanted. Michael knew it was his fault. He just needed to be better.” Michael’s voice tapered off into a whisper and it didn’t speak again for a good long moment. 

“Michael loved Curtis because he was handsome and nice, and believed Michael when he said he wasn’t crazy. Until he didn’t. One day Curtis came home at one in the morning after a night of heavy drinking and beat Michael so bad he chipped several teeth. He told him if Michael ever told anyone, he would just tell them he was crazy, after all, he was, wasn’t he? Curtis told Michael that he could never leave him, even if he wanted to, because no one else would love him. And I believed him. I didn’t just believe him; I knew what he was saying to be true.”

Gerry sniffs, not realising he had started to cry, “What happened? How did it end?”

“Curtis Jana was killed in a car crash at 3 am on the 4th of June 2007. He was the only casualty of a three-car pile-up. Michael was devastated. But he was also filled with guilt and relief, too- not because he wouldn’t have to endure Curtis anymore. No, Michael was relieved because with Curtis dead, he wouldn’t have to spend so much money on concealer.”

Gerry cries for a while after Michael finishes speaking. He turns his face into Michael’s shoulder and sobs quietly until he can’t anymore, while Michael strokes his hair and hums a dizzying tune.

“Michael, you know I love you, right? And I loved him, too,” Gerry whispers tearily.

“Yes, Gerry. Why are you so upset?” it gently swipes a thumb through his tears.

“Michael was treated terribly. I should have let him know how important he was, how loved. I didn’t do enough for him, I didn’t do… I should’ve-.” Gerry starts to cry again in earnest, clutching onto Michael.

“For what it’s worth,” Michael starts, tracing tiny spirals into the small of Gerry’s back, “Michael always loved how gentle you were with him. He never felt unsafe around you. All he wanted was someone who wouldn’t leave him; and you gave him that.”

“He didn’t know it, Michael, he didn’t…”

“He knows it now, Gerry. I know it. Now go to sleep, love, before you give yourself a headache,” it finishes with a quiet laugh.

*

“Hold on, what even is marriage, again?” Michael asks, working on its 35th attempt at making tea.

“Marriage is where two people legally bind themselves to each other so that they share everything they own and have a bunch of new responsibilities and shit.” Gerry tells it.

“Bind? I want to be magically bound to you, Gerry,” it says, handing him a mug of tea with an exaggerated wink.

Gerry smiles at it and accepts the tea, “I said legally, not magically. Hm, this tastes like it might actually have tea in it, this time. What did you different?”

“Oh, I used some tea bags, this time. That other marriage stuff sounds pretty boring, though. Why would I want to own your stuff?”

“I don’t even own any stuff. This apartment is still technically Michael’s. I’m not even paying rent anymore; I don’t know how I haven’t been evicted.”

“I took care of that, don’t worry!” Michael says cheerily.

Gerry squints at it, then shakes his head, “I’m not going to ask.”

They stand in the kitchen in silence for a few seconds until Michael asks, “Why are we getting married anyway?”

Gerry shrugs, “Michael wanted it. Plus it’d be cool if I could have an eldritch monster partner.”

“Yes. I am pretty cool.”

“Do you want to wear a dress or a suit? You’ll either have to spend a lot of money on tailoring, or you’ll have to look like a normal person for the wedding, it’s your choice. Wait how did you get that sweater to fit you the other day?”

“Gerry, I’m the Distortion I do what I want.”

“Can I do your make-up on the day?”

“What’s make-up?” Michael asks, sipping its tea.

“Wh- you know, what I wear on my face every day?” 

“You mean you don’t just look like that?”

“No! Michael, I can’t belie- wait,” Gerry stops when he sees the grin sliding onto Michael’s face, “you’re bullshitting me, aren’t you?”

Michael laughs uproariously, “Of course, silly, I’m not that stupid. What, you think I thought you cried black tears?”

Gerry shakes his head, “Fuck off.” 

Michael watches the soft smile on Gerry’s face grow when he asks, “So are we getting married or not?”

Gerry begins to nod, before he stops, his face lighting up. He puts his untouched mug of tea down on the counter before taking off down the hall, throwing “I’ll be back,” over his shoulder.

He runs back in, skidding in his socks, holding something in his hand. Michael watches keenly as Gerry gets down on one knee in front of it and holds up a ring. “Oh, I’ve seen this part on the telly!” Michael says with excitement.

“Michael,” Gerry starts, vaguely out of breath. “Will you do me the honour of becoming my Eldritch Horror?”

Michael squeals an ear-splitting noise that makes Maggot yowl mournfully from the living room, “Yes! I do!” it pulls Gerry up into a heated kiss, then breaks away, “Does that mean you’re my husband now?”

“No, babe, the ceremony comes later, but we’re engaged now.”

Michael groans and sinks to the floor theatrically.

*

Gerry’s hunting a Leitner. He is _not_ excited about this one; he’s never been a huge fan of the Flesh.

Gerry had stolen away into the institute the other day (sneaking in has become remarkably easier now that he has Michael’s doors at his disposal) and snatched a few Leitner-related files. One of them had detailed a giant flesh-beast living in the basement of an abandoned suburban house in the middle of the industrial district that had claimed the lives of not an insignificant number of stupid teenagers, daring each other to go down there and see “meatman.” Gerry had rolled his eyes at the name, but the details of the statement had all been verified, excluding the existence of a Leitner that the beast is allegedly guarding. Gerry really hopes that it’s down there, and he isn’t just going to get stomped to death by ‘meatman’ for no reason.

Gerry is facing the door to the basement. Getting in had been easy enough; there’s hardly a window left unbroken on the first floor. Michael had seemed a little annoyed that Gerry didn’t let it come with him, though.

“What if you get hurt?” Michael had said, wringing its hands.

“I won’t, I’ve done this dozens of times.”

“Why can’t I go with you, though?”

“It’s just, one of those things that people have to do on their own, you know?”

Michael had made its humans-are-weird face and left, leaving its door in front of the house. The truth is Gerry didn’t want Michael there to distract him. Gerry really loves Michael, but he doesn’t want either of them to get hurt because Michael was busy doing something confusing, drawing Gerry’s attention away from the task at hand.

And so, Gerry leans close to the basement door, without Michael, and listens. Gerry can’t hear anything at first, but once he settles his ear against the door, he begins to hear a faint… slurping, or sucking, like freshly oiled pasta being stirred with a silicon spatula. Gerry shivers, and pushes open the door before he can think himself out of there.

With the door open, the sounds are louder, and more distinctly the sounds of flesh sliding against flesh, and not in the sexy way. Beneath that is a low wailing. It’s keening and hungry, overlaying the meaty sounds with the very distinct noise of something starved. 

Gerry creeps down the steps slowly, unsure if meatman knows he’s there or not, but not wanting to risk it. Gerry gets to the bottom last stair, still obscured in shadow, when the step beneath his heavy boot creaks.

“Christ,” Gerry curses, and pulls out his knife. He jumps off the stairs in time to avoid a slimy stretch of flesh whipping out at him from the mound. Gerry gets a good look at meatman and is appalled to see that it is literally just a hill of assorted flesh parts, with something resembling a head sitting on top, two small eyes peering out.

Gerry spends a good ten minutes ducking and rolling out of the way of flinging body parts, slashing and stabbing and shooting at it as best he can, with no Leitner in sight. Gerry thinks that meatman is probably sitting on it. Gerry is tiring quickly and just deciding to retreat and come back later with a better game plan when something beside him sinks sharp teeth into his thigh, tearing and digging at the skin there. His leg is instantly warm with his own blood as he looks down to see a full set of dog teeth emerging from the flesh-beast. 

In his moment of distraction, a beefy arm swings around and catches him in the side, throwing him into the far wall. Gerry slides down the cracked bricks, trying desperately to think how he might get out of this alive, when a door that shouldn’t be there opens up in the opposite wall. Michael steps out, looking furious and alight with terrible beauty. It stabs at the thing; fingers razor sharp and making Gerry’s knife look like a toothpick. It shoves two fingers into its eyes and meatman shrieks so loudly that the whole building trembles. Michael draws another finger across what is presumably the things throat and watches with dark eyes as it shrinks and shrivels and gurgles back into the book from whence it came. The book snaps shut, and Michael turns to Gerry, full Distortion on display. 

Gerry closes his eyes before Michael’s form gives him a headache, and feels Michael pick him up with one impossibly large hand around his waist. “Don’t forget the Leitner,” Gerry says feebly.

“You, be quiet, before I do something stupid like drop you on your head.” Michael’s voice is as distorted as Gerry has ever heard it, and quivering with some kind of emotion that Gerry cannot place, nor remember having heard from Michael before.

Gerry obediently shuts his mouth and feels a whole lot of movement before he is gently set down somewhere. He opens his eyes to see Michael looking very human, and very upset.

“Michael-,” Gerry starts.

“Nope, Gerry, I’m sorry but you need to shut up. Please.”

Gerry clamps his mouth shut and watches with rapt attention as Michael cuts his pants away and begins to stitch up his thigh. Michael is methodical and precise, and has his leg bandaged and his ribs bound in under thirty minutes. Michael sits back when its done and puts its face in its bloodied hands, breathing out shakily.

“Where’d you learn to do all that, Michael?” Gerry asks gently.

“Michael took a first aid course when you explained how dangerous what you do is.”

“Oh,” Gerry says. He reaches out and takes Michaels hands away from its face. He takes its chin and guides their lips together, kissing Michael as tenderly as possible. “Thanks for patching me up.”

Michael screws up its face and slaps its hands against Gerry's chest, not enough to hurt; never enough to harm him, “You, stupid, stupid, idiot! I could’ve helped you! I could’ve stopped you getting hurt like this, but you didn’t want me! What sort of toxic masculinity bullshit is that, huh?”

Gerry winces at its words, “Michael, I am so sorry, I just didn’t want you to get hurt. I didn’t know how well you could handle it, I’m sorry.”

Michael is crying now, and Gerry feels like absolute shit. “Gerry, I can’t marry you if you’re dead!”

“That’s a fair point, Michael. I know. Hey-,” Gerry wraps his arms gingerly around Michael as it shudders against him. 

“You need to be more careful, Gerry. I love you; I can’t lose you. Not like I lost everything else.” Michael leans back to look him in the face. Michael’s grey eyes swim with unshed tears.

Gerry leans in to kiss them away, then leans their foreheads together. “Michael, I promise I will be more careful, because I really want to marry you while I’m still alive.” He takes Michael’s left hand and twists its ring where it rest on its third finger.

Michael laughs wetly and kisses Gerry on the cheek before wrapping its arms around him again. 

“Do you wanna go burn that Leitner, now?” Gerry asks.

“God, I would love nothing more than to watch that thing burn.”

Gerry brushes Michael’s tears away and smiles. Michael smiles back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> leave comments and kudos if you enjoyed! <3


	5. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Martin mistakes the Archives for a boring office job.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> set around season 3 ish, with a few details changed- specifically that everyone is still alive.

A number of years later.

When Martin had first started working in the archives, he had been intimidated. The Archives had always been a source of mystery to everyone working upstairs, so when Martin had been transferred down there after Head Archivist Gertrude Robinson disappeared, Martin was, understandably, a little bit freaked out. Ms Robinson _disappeared_ for god’s sake. She didn’t even pass away like most old people do, she _disappeared_.

It also seemed that a lot of the people working down in the Archives were very intimidating. Martin had met Elias when he’d first been transferred, and periodically since for performance reviews and the like. The guy was… weird, to say the least. Martin had heard that he wasn’t that much more accomplished than him when he’d come into the position, yet here he was, wearing a crisp grey suit with pressed slacks like some kind of old man. Martin didn’t mind though, mostly he let them do the work they needed, and was pretty lenient on holiday time. Martin didn’t ask questions.

He had also met Jonathan Sims on his first day, the new Head archivist. He was a good half-foot shorter than Martin but wore a scowl that would have moved anyone out of his way. Martin isn’t too ashamed to admit that he thought he was rather… endearing, too. The way he grumbled at everyone, even Elias, after having had a particularly heavy day, but still thanked Martin when he brought him tea, well, it made Martin feel special, even if he knew Jon didn’t actually feel anything toward him.

Tim Stoker and Sasha James joined the team shortly after. Tim was always laid-back and friendly, while Sasha was genuine and helpful. Martin found himself settling in comfortably with his workmates. After a while he even started to consider them friends; and didn’t think it was too arrogant to think that they might regard him in the same way.

Then Martin had been locked in his apartment for two weeks by some weird worm lady called Jane Prentiss, who subsequently attacked the Institute with a squirming tidal wave. Having been holed up in the Archives, together and afraid, for over 24 hours, the archival crew came out the other side of the incident with a stronger bond and more round worm-scars than any of them cared to count.

It was less than a year later that _Jurgen Leitner himself_ was found in the tunnels below the Institute. Jon had gotten what they could out of him before the police carted him away, and things had returned to their usual dull proceedings. With no big bad looming on the horizon, Martin has taken to enjoying the little things to make the time pass faster. Any office gossip or strange occurrence, Martin knew about it.

Which is why, when a weird goth guy with terribly dyed hair and ripped jeans started to use the Library and Archives with express permission from Elias himself, Martin took a vested interest in finding out just what his deal was.

The man was about 5’10’’ and looked like he could handle himself in a fight. He was slim and wore the same dark coat almost every time martin saw him, with heavy looking boots and rings on every finger of his hand, including the left ring finger. Martin chalked this up to a weird goth thing rather than the guy being married- he just didn’t look the sort.

Martin had seen him exiting Elias' office early one morning, slamming the door after growling out a rather heated, “Not a chance, old man.”

Martin found this odd for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Elias was only 30, and the man looked to be about that, as well. And secondly, people who use the Magnus Institute’s facilities don’t just _talk_ like that to _Elias Bouchard_. Who the hell does this guy think he is? Wary and not a little confused, Martin didn’t say anything to the man save for a squeaked ‘sorry’ as he shouldered past him in the hallway.

About a week after that, Martin sees the man enter artefact storage. Martin wouldn’t describe himself as nosey, but he knows he’d be lying if he said he was above a quick snoop every now and then. So Martin peaks around the door, just to see what he might be doing. He sees the goth, and another figure, which he doesn’t have time to take in fully before ducking out of sight again, worried about being seen. Martin can hear them though.

“… Don’t understand why you needed his permission anyway, I can bring you in here whenever you like.” This voice must be the other person’s; its soft and lilting, but with a weird distorted quality that makes it hard to focus on. Martin thinks they must be wearing a mask or something.

“Yeah, but I had a few close calls last month, I didn’t want to get picked up by the police again.” Trouble with the law? Martin isn’t surprised.

“Alright. Who’s in charge now, anyway?”

“Elias Bouchard. Seems like a proper dickhead.”

This is followed by a laugh. Martin rubs his temples. He must not have drunk enough water today; he can feel a headache coming on.

“Elias? He used to sell Michael weed.”

_What? Who’s Michael? Elias is a drug dealer?_

The goth laughs in turn, “No shit? Well, I better be going, I don’t want to have to answer any questions if someone sees me in here. I’ll see you later.”

“Okay, Gerry, I’ll see you at home.” There’s the sound of a door closing, and footsteps approaching the door to the hallway. The one martin is lurking behind.

Martin startles, and heads off down the hall, trying his best to look natural, and not at all like he was just eavesdropping. _So his name is Gerry,_ Martin thinks, filing the knowledge away.

*

Martin sees Gerry more and more after that but doesn’t see any sign of the person with the weird laugh that he’d been talking to. Martin is rather too intimidated to ask, especially since that would reveal he’d been listening in. The others see him around, too, and even begin to refer to him by name, and sit with him in the break room.

Martin is surprised to find that the man is actually really nice. He’s not mean or abrasive like Martin might have expected and even shows a soft side when Martin tentatively shows him pictures of his cat, Camilla, on his phone.

Gerry had told him that he has a cat too, and that his name is Maggot. Martin must have looked appropriately confused and disgusted at this, as Gerry laughed and told him it was a long story. He had started to look distant and wistful at that moment, so Martin didn’t press.

After a while, seeing a darkly dressed man stalking around the institute, occasionally sitting in at lunch in the break room, becomes just another part of life at the Magnus Institute.

*

Martin is… in love. He’s finally come to terms with it and it has taken him no small amount of time to admit it to himself, but he can finally say out loud… that he is in love with Jonathan Sims.

The inevitable admission came to him when he’d brought Jon a cup of tea; he had looked up at him and smiled gratefully. It was a moment just like any other, completely unremarkable in its mundanity, but that was it. Jon had smiled at Martin and Martin had suddenly _known_ what it was like to be in love.

“Am I a monster, Martin?” Jon says to him quietly in the break room one day, some time after Martin had come to his realisation.

“What, because you can read minds?” Martin asks, surveying Jon’s tired face.

“Well, yes. I mean, I can’t always help it, but it’s still- it’s still a huge invasion of privacy.”

“You said it yourself, Jon, you can’t always help it. As long as you’re trying you’re best, that’s all anyone can ask for.”

“But what if I’m not… what if I’m not _human_ anymore?” Jon nearly whispers, looking imploringly into Martin’s eyes.

“I’m sure you are, Jon. And even if you aren’t- so what? What is human besides just another label?” Martin lays his hand gently over Jon’s and smiles as reassuringly as he can.

Jon smiles back at him, and straightens in his chair, feeling a weight lifted off his shoulders. “Thanks, Martin. I, uh, I guess you’re right.”

A light clink sounds from their left, and they look over to see Gerry at the kettle, stirring a heap of sugar into a mug of tea. He looks up when they do, and his eyes fix on their hands, Martin’s still clasping Jon’s gently. Martin snatches his hand back and hides it in his lap, face going pink. Jon has the same idea.

“We weren’t doing-,” Martin starts.

“It’s not what it-,” Jon begins.

“Guys, guys, look,” Gerry raises his hands as they both rush to explain the completely platonic reasons why they had been holding hands, “I don’t give a fuck.”

Martin opens his mouth to say something when Gerry raises his mug in salute and promptly leaves the break room.

Jon huffs out a sigh and Martin says, “You know, for someone who knows everything, you could’ve known he was there!”

Jon shrugs, grinning sheepishly, and places his hand back on the table, palm face up.

Martin blushes again and threads his fingers through Jon’s.

*

Basira and Daisy join the Archive team about two months after Gerry and Martin first officially met. The most coherent story that anyone has been able to get from them so far is that they left the police force because of ‘spooky shit,’ and instead joined the Institute’s security team because of their ‘qualifications’ regarding said ‘spooky shit.’

Martin likes Basira. She spends most of her time reading, and not really security guarding anything, but she’s nice to him, and that’s something Martin will always appreciate in a person. Daisy however, Martin just doesn’t get. She’s very harsh and not the least bit abrasive, but Martin can’t fault her for doing her job well. Martin doesn’t understand how Daisy and Jon got to be such fast friends, and Martin might’ve even started to become a little bit jealous, until he saw Daisy drop a secretive kiss onto Basira’s cheek when she didn’t realise Martin had been in the room.

Overall, Martin thinks they’re a rather nice pair, who make a good addition to the Archival crew.

It’s about a week after they begin working there when Martin witnesses a chance encounter between Gerry and Basira in the hallway outside the break room. They both seem to just… stop, when they see each other, and lean back with a squint, like they can’t quite place the other. Martin watches as recognition colours their features and they both grimace awkwardly at each other. 

The conversation goes something like this:

“Not with the police anymore?”

“Nope. You still with that, uh, thing?”

“Yep. Your partner here?”

“Mhm.”

Gerry nods curtly, lips pulled into a politely awkward line. Basira returns the gesture, then they move past each other and go their separate ways.

Martin frowns, utterly baffled by this interaction. Do Basira and Gerry know each other? If so, how? And what had Basira meant by ‘with that thing’? Was she referring to a relationship, or more like an employment deal?

Martin needs to find out.

*

Martin, Sasha, and Basira start to make a habit of eating lunch together. Martin is very grateful for this, as it gives him ample time to ask his questions without seeming nosey or impolite. And of course, Basira and Sasha are great company.

“So,” Martin begins, not quite managing a casual tone, “I heard that you know Gerry, Basira.”

Basira nods, swallowing her bite of sandwich before saying, “Yeah me and Daisy arrested him a couple times before we came to work here.”

“Oh, really?” Sasha laughs, “What for?” Martin is grateful she’d asked the question.

“The first time was for threatening that old woman that used to work here. We had to let him go after that because no one wanted to make a fuss about it, especially Daisy. The second time was for beating up an old guy. We couldn’t hold him for that either, because the old man disappeared before we could get a statement. He looked a lot like that guy that you lot found in your tunnels last year, though, now that I think of it.”

“That’s so weird,” Sasha says. “Do you know why he attacked that man?”

“No idea- he wouldn’t talk. We did see him doing some weird shit a couple of times after that, though. Nothing we could arrest him for, but.”

“What kind of weird shit?” Martin asks nonchalantly.

Basira hums, and Martin can see she’s starting to clam up, “I don’t know if it’s my place to say, I just know he’s involved with some strange… stuff.”

“Like a cult or something?”

“No, not a cult. It’s more like, uh, a weird—you know, I’m not gonna say, it’s his business not mine.”

“That’s fair,” Martin nods understandably, secretly put out.

“Anyway, why do you care? I thought you were interested in Jon?” Basira says.

Martin is certain his face must look like a fire-truck as he spits a mouthful of tea out. “I am! Wait, no, no I’m not. But I’m not into Gerry, either, though, is what I’m trying to say.”

“He’s not bad looking,” Sasha says, “If you can get past that dye job.”

Basira and Sasha laugh, and Martin’s relatively sure he’s in the clear.

*

Martin sees Gerry again about a week after he had caught him and Jon holding hands in the break room. Gerry is scrolling through his phone, a mug forgotten on the table in front of him. Martin sits down across from him with his lunch, feeling like it would be a little weird if he sat at a different table. Gerry looks up and regards him calmly. 

Martin hadn’t intended to, but he finds himself spilling his guts anyway, “I know Jon’s a little weird, and he creeps some people out, but I really like him okay, so if you have anything bad to say about it you can… just… piss off!”

A startled laugh escapes Gerry before he can seem to stop it. “Martin, I am the last person to judge anyone for wanting to date a monster. I really, honestly, have zero feelings about it. Jon might have some beholding in him but that doesn’t mean he’s inhuman.”

“W-we’re not dating, actually.” Martin admits quietly, humbled by Gerry’s reasonability.

“Sure you aren’t,” Gerry says, smiling knowingly.

*

Martin thinks he might have gotten a little too comfortable in the uneventfulness of the Archives, because it isn’t long before Jon gets stabbed. Jon won’t admit that he’s been stabbed; he keeps insisting that the obvious gash in his side is self-inflicted, from slipping while cutting a piece of bread.

Martin tentatively enters Jon’s office, a few days after he had seen the red-stained bandage wrapped around his middle.

 _It’s for his own good,_ Martin tells himself, reinforcing his resolve, as Jon lifts his head when he approaches.

“Oh. Martin, did you need something?”

“Yes. Actually. I need you to tell me who stabbed you.”

Jon bites his lip and looks away, “Look, Martin, I told you I-.”

“Nope. Cut the bullshit, Jon, I know you didn’t stab yourself.”

Jon sighs, defeated, and gestures to the chair in front of him. “Fine. Take a seat.”

Martin does, bracing himself for what he’s about to hear.

“So, last week, a man showed up in my office, and he stabbed me.”

Martin blinks. “That’s it? What do you mean, ‘showed up’? Who let him in? How did he get out? What did he look like? Why didn’t you call the police, or Daisy, I’m sure she could have done something!”

“Martin, Martin! Slow down. One at a time, please?”

“Okay, sorry. How did he get in?”

“I’m not sure. One moment, there was no door here, then there was, then he came through it.”

“Where?”

“Right there.”

“There’s no door there.”

“Exactly! There’s never been a door there. I think… I think he made the door. Or _is_ the door, I’m not sure, something he said…” Jon shakes his head, “It’s hard to hold the image of him in my mind.”

“So he spoke to you?”

“Yes, he said his name was Michael. He was tall and… and he had long blonde hair. He said a lot of stuff, it was so confusing. Then he left, through the door he came through. Then there was no door there, and never had been.”

“But he stabbed you?”

“Yes. With- with his hands, I think. I think they were sharp, it’s hard to tell.”

“So he came in, said some confusing stuff, stabbed you, and left?”

“Yes.”

“And why didn’t you tell anybody?”

“I told Sasha. She’s met him before.”

“ _What?_ It was the same Michael from Sasha’s statement two years ago? You couldn’t have led with that?” Martin says incredulously.

“I’m sorry, okay? It was a very disorienting encounter.”

“Oh, yeah, of course, sorry Jon,” Martin says. “Can I get you anything?”

Jon sighs, and shakes his head. “But you can stay, if you like. Please,” he hurriedly adds when Martin starts to get up, a hopeful smile on his tired face.

Martin smiles and sits back down.

*

“Oh! Did you hear that Jon got _stabbed_ in his office the other day?” Tim says, pausing with a spoonful of yoghurt halfway to his mouth.

Tim and Martin had sat down to lunch together that day, since Basira wasn’t working, and Sasha had taken to going out for lunch with the guy she had started seeing. Gerry had joined them, sitting down at the table without a word, silently soaking in their conversation.

Gerry frowns at this, looking like Tim had just reminded him of something.

“Yeah, that guy from Sasha’s statement; Michael,” Martin says, and continues on, not noticing the look on Gerry’s face, “It took like a whole week for him to actually admit that he’d been sta-.”

“Hold on, Martin,” Tim, says, holding a hand up and looking pointedly at Gerry, who had gone still at the mention of the door monster, “you _know_ something, don’t you, Gerry?”

Gerry glances between them, considering whether or not to spill his guts, it looks like. He shoots a look over his shoulder before saying, “Alright, fine. I’ll tell you what I know.”

Martin and Tim lean close.

“Michael is an avatar of the Spiral. It used to be an archival assistant here before Gertrude sacrificed him to stop the Great Twisting. Now it likes to harass Jon because he’s head archivist, and it’s some kind of petty revenge for what Gertrude did.”

Martin squints at him, and Tim looks like he’s trying to do a tricky multiplication in his head.

“How do you know all this?” Tim says.

“Do you know where he lives?” Martin asks at the same time.

Gerry nods sagely, “I do. It lives in my apartment.”

Tim and Martin exchange identical frowns, and Tim shakes his head, as if to say ‘why?’

Gerry nods again and finishes, “Because we’re engaged.”

“ _WHAT_ ,” Martin squeaks, while Tim laughs uproariously.

“Good one, Gerry! Really had me for a second,” he wipes a tear from his eye and pats Gerry on the shoulder.

Gerry shakes his head calmly. “Not joking. Actually, I’ve been meaning to mention it for a while. Michael’s been really nagging about getting married lately but I have no idea how to go about it.”

“Wait. You’re serious?” Tim asks. Gerry nods. Tim nods in return, “Huh. So you are going to get married to the thing that stabbed Jon last week?”

Gerry nods again, blushing slightly.

Tim grins and raises his hand for a high five, “Nice!”

“No! Not nice!” Martin speaks up, “It stabbed Jon!”

“He’ll get over it! Look, Gerry, I love wedding planning, I’ll hook you up. How long have you been engaged now?”

“Years, now. Michael’s getting real antsy.”

A crackling laugh fills the room as Michael steps out of a yellow door that shouldn’t be there, “It’s like Pam and Roy on the Office, Gerry, really it’s getting ridiculous.”

“Oh my--,” Martin says, feeling lightheaded at the sound of that laugh.

“Oh, this is it?” Tim asks, standing and offering his hand politely, “I’m Tim!”

Michael cocks its head to the side and looks at the proffered hand. It lifts its sharp hands into view and shrugs apologetically. “I’m Michael.”

“You stabbed Jon!” Martin says accusingly.

Michael looks offended, “He was going to attack me!”

“Oh, uh, he didn’t tell me that.” Martin says lamely. “Wait. This is why you said you couldn’t judge someone for dating a monster?”

“Yeah,” Gerry says, “Honestly, I thought you put the pieces together a while ago.”

Martin shrugs, and blushes, _How could I have been so blind?_

“So, Michael, do you prefer spring or summer weddings? Or fall, even?”

Michael hums thoughtfully, and Martin politely excuses himself, feeling sick.

*

Gerry spends a lot less time actively hiding his interactions with Michael after that, Martin notices. Not two days later, Martin happens across them in the library, between the shelf on ghosts and the shelf on demonic mythology. 

Michael looks significantly more human, and Martin thinks that if he didn’t know what Michael was, he would say it looks practically non-threatening. It’s tall with curly blonde hair tumbling onto its shoulders, a sweet smile sitting on its face as it holds Gerry’s hands gently in its own. Martin thinks they make for an odd pair, but he can’t say that they aren’t cute together.

Martin watches with rapt attention as they talk quietly between themselves, before being broken out of his trance when they share a tender kiss. Martin is just about to leave, ashamed at his impromptu voyeurism when he catches sight of the smile on Gerry’s face. It’s quiet and blissful, and Martin can’t help but feel slightly envious at the love they must share.

Nonetheless, Martin walks away from the library quite a bit more excited for the wedding than he would have expected.

*

As far as anyone can tell, no one has mentioned this turn of events to Jon. And it’s the unspoken conclusion of the Archival staff that telling him is somehow Martin’s responsibility.

Martin is eating lunch with Jon in his office when he decides to break the news.

“So,” he starts, “did you hear that Gerry’s getting married?”

Jon stops chewing and actually looks surprised. “To whom?” he says through a mouthful of pasta.

“It’s funny actually, you might know him,” Martin says, fake casual.

Jon frowns, and swallows. “Who is it Martin?” he asks seriously.

“Michael the Distortion,” he squeaks.

“ _WHAT_ ”

The End.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaand thats it! thanks so much for reading. i really appreciate it :)


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